As an artist (under the name Anna Gray + Ryan Wilson Paulsen) we’ve been co-creating art and life projects for the past eleven years. Our work is diverse in shape and scope, often functioning in response to the texts we read and to the experience of reading itself, whether on a page, sign, screen, or street. Within that frame, our pieces functions like marginalia, penned next to existing paragraphs and cultural phenomena. Curiosity and a desire for deeper understanding drives us, which have included photographs that inventory the color, metaphors, or objects (both concrete and speculative) in novels and philosophical texts; large-scale sculptural props, like our Standing Chalkbox; or more perfomative gestures in public space. Behind the production of images and objects, we're constantly involved with more research-based activities, weaving together relevant strands from many fields as we explore subjects such as the dead-pan expression, artistic labor and resistance, drone technology and imminent visuality, debt, appropriation, or the difficulties of conserving a common history.
Recently, our interests have begun to center on finding imaginative ways to use visual art amidst the swell of crises that characterize our social moment, looking particularly at the subversive potential in collectivity and play. In the past few years, working with Spreading Rumors (a small group of artists making interventions in existing forms of communication and distribution) and IT-503 (a leftist reading group that creates itinerant events and ephemera) we’ve experimented with balloon signage, confetti, real-estate signs, public discussion, and multimedia mass texting as aesthetic forms to make and circulate playfully serious, ephemeral public projects.
Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen work as a single artistic entity that most often focuses on the activities of reading and writing. They translate and graft together the information they find, drawing extensively from books, art history, literature, philosophy, and philology. They do so while attempting not to neglect other forms of knowledge, whether that be watching YouTube or talking to the cashier at the corner store. The sound of a sentence, the look of a paragraph and the scaffolding of a book - these are the structures that form the base of thought for what they create.
Portland-based artist duo Anna Gray & Ryan Wilson Paulsen earned their BFA at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and their MFA at Portland State University. Among the awards and residencies Gray & Paulsen have received are an artist residency at the Schneider Museum of Art, a fellowship at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, a commission at the San Diego Museum of Art, and a Precipice Fund Grant. They have mounted several projects in Portland and California, and have created numerous publications since 2007. Among their solo and group exhibitions are included shows at PDX Contemporary Art (Portland, OR), Marylhurst Art Gym (Portland, OR), Disjecta (Portland, OR), SPACES (Cleveland, OH), Museum of Northwest Art (La Conner, WA), Renaissance Society (Chicago, IL), Boise State University (Boise, ID), Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA), Schneider Museum of Art (Ashland, OR), galleryHOMELAND (Portland, OR), Napoleon (Philadelphia, PA), Cornish College of the Arts (Seattle, WA), University of Oregon (Eugene, OR), James Harris Gallery (Seattle, WA), Locust Projects (Miami, FL), The White Box (Portland, OR), Botkyrka Konsthall (Tumba, Sweden), and Milepost 5 (Portland, OR). They are currently represented by PDX Contemporary Art in Portland.
Gray & Paulsen are included in the public collections of Washington University Library (St. Louis, MO), University of Oregon (Eugene, OR), and the Victoria & Albert Museum (London, UK), among others.
Besides their own exhaustive writing and publication projects, the artists’ works have been included in features, mentions, and reviews in Scene, Dazed, Oregon Arts Watch, Bad at Sports, The Pedagogical Impulse, Art and Social Practice Journal, BOMBlog, Daily Serving, Huffington Post, Willamette Week, Hyperallergic, frieze, Portland Mercury, Portland Monthly, Shift, Ultra, PORT, The Oregonian, and Statesman Journal.
