ANITA STO

CURATOR’S STATEMENT
Anita Sto is dedicated to forcing the boundaries of comprehension, recognition, and perception of the self through varying mediated forms. What lies in the self-conscious of a person when not involved with the image?
Anita’s concern with the self/identity and perspective draws the viewer, challenging each to bravely traverse the darkness and lightness that exist within the psyche.
In graphically conceptual works that slice into the darkness providing a portal by which to immerse oneself in duration and endurance, Anita charges one to consider his/her own desires and capacities.
Anita Sto’s, One-Year Performance work, experiments with duration and endurance.  In the work, Anita avoided her own image in any mirror or other reflective surface for one year.  The artist states, “the intention of the 365 days performance was to find how and where the Self acts, besides the objectiveness of visual images but through feelings, impressions and considerations.”  This is the journey of all, to discover the “I” without regard for the external, fully committed to the internal, with knowledge of its benefits. 

Whitney V. Hunter
Performance and Exhibition Artist
New York

November 11th, 2010
STATEMENT
I, Anita Sto, plan to do a one year performance piece.
I shall NOT see myself in the mirror.
I shall NOT see myself in any kind of picture (on screen or on paper).

The performance will begin on November 11st, 2010 at 11AM
and continue until November 11st, 2011 at 11AM.

Anita Sto
Lucien Zayan




51 Bergen Street
Studio 2nd Floor
Brooklyn 11201, NY
The Invisible Dog Art Center

I see things running too fast, as being on a train and watching the landscape through the window –– a run which makes people short-sighted. To achieve clarity at the horizon through attempts and efforts, eye’s nerves get stretched, pupils become tired, expectations fail, confidence goes sotto le scarpe* –– leaving pain in the body and melancholy in the soul.

And so -- now I assumed that the issue doesn’t stand in being or not being short-sighted but it’s because things are running too fast. The blindness is not the cause but rather the consequence.

One year experimental-performance piece was a tool, an opportunity to create a break into that status quo.
I imposed a slowdown to this run. Not using mirrors was the key, the rule, the slowdown, the ‘something different’ from my every day running life.

What-is-not reveals what-is-what.

*Under the shoes

What do I do in a mirror? - I cry
I use a lot of muscles when I cry, I can tell You.
There is something interesting in looking at your-self in a mirror while rivers of tears are running out from eyes.

When there is pain, it stands in the belly. The more it stays here the more a kind of feeling of constriction grows in It. To cry is a way to have a little bit of release from this pain. Muscles make it happens:

From the belly to the pupils, small contractions move that ‘boiled-potato-pain’ up to the head and through water it seems to flow away. I like to look at this process, especially because the person who is doing it is me.
Not just feelings but also visual images -- pictures in the mirror like frames in an animation.

In this way I can feel double pain and double relief too.
In this way I can remember more strongly...
and maybe learn something of me for me.

To hold the breath in order to achieve more air once You breath in again.
To expand the lungs, as life is coming in, and then release them, expand and release, expand and release...

I put my face inside the mirror (as for Narcissus, my glass was made of water), because I thought that to get rid of the surfaces would have made more clear how things really are.

I saw my pain and joy, my guts and my mind as I was looking at my self from a point of view which wasn’t through my eyes.

I focused my attention on the body and the mind, because my wonder was about how it feels to live.

I found out things which where lying down somewhere in me, in the shadows of some sort of fears and doubts and tremblings and lumps in my throat.
Everything comes in order to reveal something else –– its coplanar image.

There are two mirrors in Life which detect the-Self: people and our own guts.

For more information about the artist and the work contact:
Whitney V. Hunter, Curator
info@whitneyhunter.com

To purchase the book ONE YEAR PERFORMANCE
please contact: mail@anitasto.com