Bio
Anna Reidister is a interdisciplinary artist, writer, and musician located in Boston, MA. Her work explores the intersection of storytelling, character building, and capitalism through post-digital objects, folk rock, and poetry. She aims to expose the absurdity of neoliberalism, imagine new worlds and envision alternate realities. She holds a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Interrelated Media and a minor in Creative Writing.
Curriculum Vitae
Education
2022
Studio Recording, Engineering & Production Summer Program
Institute for the Musical Arts, Goshen, MA
2021
BFA, Studio for Interrelated Media
Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA
Select Performances
2022
Studio for Interrelated Media Alumni & Founders Day, MassArt, Boston, MA
A Trip to the Moon: Early Special Effects Screenings and Improvisation, Gallery 263, Cambridge, MA WFSR Acoustic Sundays, Boston, MA
Aeronaut Allston, Allston, MA
Solstice Jubilee Flea, Allston, MA
Leesta Vall Sound Recordings, Brooklyn, NY
Via: Behind VA Shadows — ICA Group Show, Boston, MA
Somerville Porch Fest, Somerville, MA
Selected Event Production
2022
Solstice Jubilee Flea, Allston, MA
2019
TedXYouth@Beacon St, Raise Your Voice. Walk the Talk. Accelerate youth-driven change. Boston, MA
Select Group Exhibitions
2022
Discipline of Sleep: Behind VA Shadows, online exhibition
Via: Behind VA Shadows — ICA Group Show, Spaceus Gallery, Boston, MA
Pockets of Belief: Behind VA Shadows — online exhibition
2019
All School Show, Studio for Interrelated Media, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA
2018
Big Show, Studio for Interrelated Media, Massachusetts College of Art and Design
Select Publications
Moral Crema Magazine Issue No. 4, Summer 2021
Moral Crema Magazine Issue No. 3, Spring 2021
Boston Intercollegiate Undergraduate Poetry Publication, 2021
MassArt Texture Poetry Journal, 2020
Select Publications by the Artist
2020
Queen-sized Feast, online publication
&, online publication
2019
Lean In Magazine, online publication
2018
The Priest’s Knee, poetry collection
Curatorial
2022
Pockets of Belief: Behind VA Shadows, online exhibition
Residencies
2021
Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Open Studio Residency
Select Awards & Scholarships
Class of 1917 Award (Outstanding Junior in Liberal Arts), 2020
John and Abigail Adams Scholarship, 2017-2021
MassArt Grant, 2017-2021
MassArt Merit Scholarship, 2017-2021
Artist Statement
I remember sitting on that rickety dock at Silver Lake, with my feet dangling just above the water. I’d stretch my foot out like a ballerina practicing pointe, and break the still water’s surface with the tips of my toes. So long as the sun was out, my mind rested well, knowing without a doubt that I could find my mother in the garden, tending to whatever we’d be having for dinner a few weeks from the day. Before my brother took over his role as head of the house, my father sold factory real-estate all throughout northeastern New Jersey. It was the creative act that saved my heart after he went away. It was on that lonely land that I became a poet.
My name is Anna Reidister and I am a post-pastoral poet in the pre-de-industrialized era working predominantly in what will come to be known as Perfect Poetry, an artifact of “secret art.” Currently in my work I seek to redefine concepts. I explore notions of classism and spontaneity as a means of disintegrating global politics. I juxtapose radical organic imagery with the playfulness of slant rhymes. My latest collection of poetry, Approaching Perfection, explores my relationship with cognition as a woman, particularly a woman in “secret art.” My work should, within the next decade, catalyze a global A.O.B. (Abolition of Borders).
While I can’t talk about “secret art,” I can speak of its imagistic sister movement, Pennsylvania Gunk. PG, as it’s often called by its practitioners, is a post-gunk practice currently emerging out of Lower North Philadelphia's DIY scene. While it fully embraces the traditional subject-object relationships in gunk, it rejects the notion that Pure Image can be produced consensually. The pioneer of the movement, Sean Khulman, states that “[Pure Image] hasn’t been achieved in art nor nature, by man nor God; that is obvious. If it had, the world would weigh very little. Something has got to break, and that something is the muse.” According to Khulman’s Cognitive Clog Theory, however, Pure Image cannot coexist with industrial society, which, thus inhibits the invention and practice of Perfect Poetry.
In Approaching Perfection, my seminal collection of neo-prose, I paint a linguistic portrait of an upcoming world in which Perfect Poetry can be attained. It is an exercise in the art of patience, while we wait for the declogging. The cognitive cleansing of neural networks will generate space for pure, undiluted creative expression. The speaker, a PG psychic hailing from what once was known as Philadelphia, is torn between his love for the muse and his duty to art in pre-de-industrialized society. He grapples with his fear of the destruction of the subject and the collapse of contemporary art. Taking inspiration from the impulses of Sean Khulman’s writing, each poem is drafted, edited, and completed entirely subconsciously. Each lyrical line is no longer than fourteen letters to achieve a certain suppleness in form and to reflect the buoyancy of a mind unburdened by bureaucracy. I break the fourth wall to recontextualize the speaker’s disillusionment with legislation. The challenge in my work is to see beyond the here and now and into the new world at our doorstep.
When my mentor, Isaiah Sánchez, gets off parole, He will produce a series of Polaroids depicting the day-to-day struggles of Amish sex workers in the city that will come to be known as The American Gamorrah. With each of His photographs, He’ll include a sonnet, extracted, unadulterated, from the subconscious of the subject; this will be, for all intents and purposes, a sacrificial act. It is in this moment that the door to Perfect Poetry will crack open, and Isaiah’s Light will be able to grace the world’s people. Under his tutelage, my poetry will be--to the rest of poetry--what a plate of grease is to a flock of gulls.
︎annareidister@gmail.com