Anna Helgeson | Aweful Photos

I create expressive, politically charged photographs, paintings, and performances informed by the strangeness of being alive. 

Before I learned that the world could be cruel, I saw that it was gorgeous. Growing up as a feral child in the woods of northern Wisconsin my most formative memories are filled with trees, mud puddles, and wild creatures. My parents moved back to the land in the mid 1970s and started an organic farming commune. I would fall asleep after a day in the woods to the sound of my dad on the porch talking with friends about Marx and wind turbines. When I was school aged I attended the public school in the small town near the farm. Most of my classmates' families had lived in this small town for generations and were suspicious of outsiders. My family was seen as weird and godless.
I bring all of this to my work as I still see powerful beauty everywhere while simultaneously recognizing the damaging cruelty of extractive capitalism and the systems required to maintain it; including race, gender, and heteronormativity.

The word aweful has a double meaning; spelled with an e it means reverential respect mixed with fear and wonder, spelled without an e it means terrible. My work holds these two ideas in simultaneous suspension.

My most recent photographic series,The Third Thing, is about delight; the joy of noticing strange and wonderful creatures formed when fallen leaves merge with their shadows. And it is about the power of our imaginations to either limit or expand what we are capable of seeing.

In What Light Knows, I start with an open ended question; can light hold memory? With wildly colorful photographs and paintings I am marking my reverence for the beauty of how light moves in a haunted field near my home and wondering what it remembers of the Highland Hospital fire in 1948 that killed nine women who were sedated and locked in their rooms, diagnosed with hysteria, killed by mid-centery misogyny.

Since 2008 I have been performing as a character named Whitey dressed in an absurd mash-up of white-face, colonial wig, and various items that signal the bizarre inventions whiteness; an all white “Indian headdress”, a white gown with an exaggerated 19th century bustle, a MAGA necklace…calling attention to my own whiteness and the fact that we all live in racialize bodies.  Race is simultaneously a deeply entrenched and violently maintained system of power, and also a completely fictional belief.

In all my work I seek companionship to navigate this aweful and awful time and place.

I received a BA from Ripon College, and an MFA (Cum Laude) from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. I have exhibited, performed, and lectured throughout the United States including: The Bascom: A Center for the Visual Arts (Highlands, NC), John W. Bardo Fine and Performing Arts Center (Cullowhee, NC), Holden Gallery (Swannanoa, NC),The Asheville Art Museum (Asheville, NC), The University of North Carolina, Asheville (Asheville, NC), Revolve Gallery (Asheville, NC), Work Gallery (Detroit, MI), The Milwaukee Art Museum, Lucky Star Gallery (Milwaukee, WI), The University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Union Gallery, and am featured on the website “Reframing Photography; Theory and Practice” (Routledge Press).