NEW YORK.- Yvon Lambert New York is pleased to announce the first exhibition at the gallery by artist Anna Gaskell. Marking an important development in Gaskell’s work, Paint Your Own Pictures will consist solely of films. The exhibition installation, designed in collaboration with architects EMA Designs, will feature three new films, all completed in 2006 and 2007, Acting Lessons, Vermilion (That’s All I Remember), and Mirror. The exhibition will be on view from May 3 through 26, 2007, and is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10AM-6PM. A reception for the artist will be held at the gallery May 1 from 6 to 8 pm.

As an important aspect of her art-making practice for over a decade, Gaskell’s films elaborate on the narratives and themes that inform her photographs. In this selection of new films, Gaskell continues to find inspiration from conjuring up stories about stories, examined through the phenomena of memory. Each film in Paint Your Own Pictures explores the rifts in the subjectivity of perception.

Acting Lessons is an intimate and unsettling glimpse of Gaskell rehearsing a monologue of a complex and personal episode while being directed by an acting coach. The result is a challenge to the artist’s own recollection and response to her own character’s story. In Vermilion, twins describe the shared experience of the most important day of their lives. The two children agree, contradict one another and even invent new specifics, trying their best to register a similar memory. Although they describe the same event, experienced first-hand, we questions the truth of the event itself due to conflicting witness accounts. For Mirror, Gaskell made a silent film that depicts an ambiguous sequence of events – a girl seen only briefly, pauses then runs off, disappearing into a thick wood. Gaskell showed the silent film to a group of junior-high school students, and a week later recorded the students’ conflicting accounts of their own recollections. In the completed work, the students’ “narration” further complicates our understanding of the film, rather than adding clarity.

Anna Gaskell was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1969. She studied at Bennington College and the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received a BFA in 1992; she received an MFA from Yale University in 1995. Her first solo exhibition was in New York in 1997; she has since been featured in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami (1998), Aspen Art Museum (2000), Castello di Rivoli, Italy (2001), the Menil Collection in Houston (2002) and Art Unlimited at Art Basel (2005). She has also participated in dozens of group shows, including Sightings at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (1998), Photography Past/Forward: Aperture at 50 at Burden Gallery in New York (2002), Moving Pictures at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2002-2004), Stalemate at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2005), and most recently is featured in Pretty Baby at the Modern Art Museum of Ft. Worth and Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum. She received the Citibank Private Bank Photography Prize in 2000 and a Nancy Graves Foundation grant in 2002. She lives and works in New York.