Ann LePore was raised in the garage under her father’s car. The works she creates are heavily influenced by her experiences as a storyteller, champion of science, civil society and as a seeker of secret landscapes. A long-term subject of her work has been the social landscape. Her processes include projection mapping, animation, printmaking, installation, and data visualization.
LePore has exhibited with e-Flux and Serpentine Gallery, London, and also shown her work in New York, Newark, Anchorage, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Moscow, and Art Basel Switzerland. Much of her research has been completed during artist residencies including at the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, and aboard the Research Vessel Sea Wolf. Ann received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts. She is currently an Associate Professor of 3D Design and Animation at Ramapo College of New Jersey.
Statement:
A long-term subject of my work has been the landscape, that seemingly familiar American environment; verdant, endless, yet loaded with historical and environmental contradiction. Regardless of the form, I aim to create tools for conversations with strangers and create room to question the way we organize our shared experiences.
My current project, FOOD STORE(Y), is a series of performance actions that generate animated gestures and an archive of stories, each resulting from a meal with a stranger. Dozens of short animations are based on the intimate gestures of storytellers with whom I record a series of interviews. I document feeding a stranger at my table in exchange for recording their story, which I then condense into an animation of just a few, intimate gestures, to be exhibited publicly. This is part of a larger long-term project which has 3 products: An interview collection as documented performance, animation exhibitions, and a final repository of stories in the form of a podcast.
The impetus for this project began as a way to address living in a fractured society, with “dueling facts” and siloed existences. In Summer 2020 I began researching the cultural histories of intimate storytelling- and the role it plays in getting strangers to bond with each other.