Janna Avner in the Artist Studio

Artist Statement

My paintings, sculptures, and videos emphasize cognition and perception through the generation of physical and digital experiences. When viewed from oblique angles, my work reveals the interactions of projected light, resulting in the recreation of the Aurora Borealis. I produce physical and digital works where liminality, in-between spaces, and experiences outside a colonized world offer new possibilities.

As a multi-heritage, Alaska Native (Koyukon Ahthabascan), I document natural light in the Alaskan and Californian terrain to reimagine perception as Indigenous, subliminal, and theoretical. The work insists that perception is as much a simple as it is a subjective creation. “False light” permeates my pieces and may appear artificial and, at other times, genuine. Light itself is not objective; it bends and twists, invoking the unsolvable particle-wave paradox in quantum mechanics. This shifting and unresolved framework guides my physical and experiential image making.

Using light as a material, I reclaim the romanticization of landscape imagery, that often drives tourism, commerce and profit in spaces of natural beauty which harkens to early Manifest Destiny policies in the American West, by providing expansive interpretations of Indigeneity, perception, and the environment. As a visual metaphor, projections of beadwork and Indigenous imagery become the light that moves through everything, embodying continuity in relation to past and present technologies. Digital, traditional, and upcycled materials form hybrid objects that represent an imagined and ancestral potentiality. If we are active participants in the optical viewing of phenomena, my work speculatively asks, “What is seen when imagining the future?”

About the Artist

Janna Avner graduated from Yale University in 2012 with high honors in the visual arts and Summa Cum Laude At California State University Northridge 2022. She has exhibited in Los Angeles, Utah, Alaska, Japan, New York, and New Mexico. Her artworks and curations are covered in Vice, Hyperallergic, LA Weekly, Artforum, ARTNews, the Los Angeles Times, the Paris Review, and the New York Times.

Avner was a guest speaker for UCLA’s Digital Media Arts Department (2017) and the New York Times School (2019). Avner’s current work focuses on dislocation, technology theory, and indigenous futurism and was the Eric and Barbara Dobkin Native Art Fellow at the School for Advanced Research in 2023.

Avner’s writings on Artificial Intelligence were published in What Future: The Year’s Best Ideas to Reclaim, Reanimate, and Reinvent Our Future (2017), considered “one of the best science books of the year” by Smithsonian Magazine. She cofounded the digital media festival FEMMEBIT and advises SUPERCOLLIDER Gallery.

Learn more about her work on her website and on Instagram @janna_avner.