LONG BEACH, CA.-The University Art Museum is pleased to present Burned out by the Rising Sun: Works by Anna Von Mertens on view in the galleries from February 1-April 8, 2007. Anna Von Mertens’ work considers our oblique relationship to moments in time and our attempts to form an understanding of this shifting idea. Her latest body of work, As the Stars Go By, examines the star rotation patterns above violent moments in American history. Using hand-stitching as a marking of time, these fabric works have the proportions of a movie screen; some over 8’. The series selects historical events where a psychological shift occurs, and the pieces act on many levels: as a memorial, as an actual viewpoint or landscape from a specific moment in history, as a study of astrological forces. But ultimately it simply documents a natural cycle that is oblivious and impassive to the violence below . Two quilt works separate from this series, Vanishing Point and Tank Shrapnel, use the site of the bed as an intimate lens to examine the overlapping phenomena of the finite and the infinite. Vanishing Point, including hundreds of converging white stitched lines, references cosmological phenomenon and typical depictions of the Holy Ghost; Tank Shrapnel’s stitch pattern freezes the moment of an explosion when an object is transformed from something recognizable to something unknown.

Lynn LeBate, essayist for the accompanying exhibition handout, states, “Von Mertens quilts, substituting stitch for brushstroke, to create her own vocabulary. The act of stargazing, antithetical to the pace of contemporary culture, offers the opportunity for contemplation, the act of thoughtful observation. Stargazing, however, is neither fast paced nor requires the visual literacy necessary to decode the bombardment of imagery seen on a daily basis. Rather, it is a timeless act, chosen by Von Mertens, ‘because stargazing, as an ancient form of existential observation, is one of the most universal acts of looking. It is a way we locate where we are literally and metaphorically.’”

“Anything is a legitimate area of investigation.”– Jenny Holzer

Von Mertens was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1973. She received her B.A. from Brown University in 1995 and her M.F.A. in 2000 from the California College of the Arts. In 2000, Von Mertens received the M.F.A. Studio Award at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California, where she was an Affiliate Artist the following year; and in 2002, she was awarded a New Hampshire Fellowship as an Artist-in-Residence at the prestigious MacDowell Colony. Von Mertens’s work has been shown in exhibitions at Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; University Art Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara, Calif.; Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, CA; Sara Meltzer Gallery, New York, NY; White Box, New York, NY; Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena, CA; Center for Curatorial Studies Museum, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, NY; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA, among others. Her work has appeared in such publications as Artweek, artUS, Cabinet, the Los Angeles Times, Fiberarts, Flash Art, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Surface Design Journal, and The Independent. Von Mertens currently teaches at the University of California, Berkeley and California College of the Arts.