Capturing Changes
Ann Diener's new works address issues of land and water
Agricultural Product Map– San Joaquin Valley, 2022, acrylic ink and beads on printed map, 8.5 x 11 in.
Written by John Connelly
Photographs by Sara Prince
Ann Diener’s artwork has always revolved around a sense of place, time, and history. Her drawings and installations often explore the societal and anthropological ramifications of our complex relationship with land and culture. Her tranquil seaside art studio just south of Santa Barbara, designed by longtime friend Robin Donaldson of Donaldson + Partners, is nestled among gardens and towering trees and has views of the Pacific. She says it has “incredible light” and a huge main wall that “has inspired her to work at a large scale.” This expanse of blank creative space allows Diener to put up sketches and other research materials from her extensive reference library of “image and idea files” that she refers to constantly while working. Her newest collection of work created in this inspirational setting delves into California’s complicated and fraught relationship with water and farming.
During a visit to the farm where her grandparents lived, Diener—a fourth-generation descendant of a California farming family—was struck by how much the landscape had changed since she was a child. This alteration was embodied in rows of suburban tract housing and strip malls or, in the remaining fields, enormous greenhouses churning out produce from genetically and scientifically engineered seeds. Before beginning work for her upcoming show, Diener read “a couple of dozen books on factory farming and issues relevant to it,” as well as “numerous articles on soil, water, and other issues pertinent to industrial agriculture.” The technological changes in farming practices over the past century, she realized, signified a profound shifting of the land from “agrarian to industrial, natural to man-made, organic to planned, and flat to stacked.” Diener was interested in rendering this dramatic transformation in her drawings. Her process of layering images, one atop another, supplemented by maps, prints, diagrams, photographs, and cutouts of smaller drawings, is well suited to a subject that reflects how “place is experienced both currently and historically, how identity is tied to place, and how politics influence the systems that structure our lives.”
“Ann Diener’s drawings often explore the societal and anthropological ramifications of our complex relationship with land and culture.”
Diener was inspired by writer and journalist Mark Arax’s The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California, a book about California’s water and soil. Arax traveled the state to explore its unprecedented and ambitious water-distribution system, a complex juggernaut built in the middle of the last century that has fueled California’s relentless growth. The state is straining to keep pace with its role as one of society’s most prodigious food providers.
Diener’s projects focus on the fertile San Joaquin Valley, home to agriculture that produces a large portion of the world’s food supply. She chose the area because it epitomizes both “the good and the bad” of our modern agribusiness approach to farming. Diener describes the place as “a land of stark social, racial, and economic inequalities,” where giant industrial and agricultural operations leave gaping land scars and exert control over water tables to the detriment of smaller family-owned farms. In her latest work she seeks to embody this inequality visually and to “illustrate the chasm between the few who control the capital and resources and the low-income families, peripatetic immigrant labor, and small farmers.”
The resulting tapestries, drawings, maps, and sculpture are on view this summer in an installation at the Lancaster Museum of Art and History (lancastermoah.com) titled The Invented Land. Diener’s drawings typically feature beautifully orchestrated gestural compositional lines, symbols, and forms that move fluidly between representation and abstraction. In Liquid Gold, a large-scale graphite, ink, and colored-pencil drawing on paper, a series of compact repeated circular forms ebb and flow, suggesting both the fruit of vineyards and droplets of water. The vertiginous space created by dynamic swooping lines suggests rhizomatic root systems and conveys the literal and dramatic steep drop in land heights when aquifers are drained.
Greenhouse, 2024/2023, wood with metal, acrylic elements, and beads, 14 x 10 x 12 ft.
In Agricultural Product Map–San Joaquin Valley, Diener uses the power of graphics to project a colorful cornucopia over an antique map, showing the orderly fields and hills of central California being devoured and bulldozed by a symbol of abundance.
The heart of Diener’s new installation is Greenhouse, 2023, a chapel-like sculpture adorned with dangling clear and white acrylic leaves and beaded copper-colored wire branches representing almond trees. Dancing outside the structure’s natural wood beams are more lyrical line drawings. The sculpture was created in collaboration with D+ Workshop, the fabrication arm of Donaldson’s architectural studio.
“The paramount issue of California agriculture is water,” Diener states in the catalog essay accompanying the exhibition. “The adaptation of industrial agriculture to a changing climate represents a metaphor for climate change on a larger level. It creates a parable of the need to respond to environmental shifts to continue to produce food for a growing human population.”
This insight suggests that although technology and change are wrapped up in science and advancement, they need not forget the history of the place we come from. And that is the land, which as Arak points out in his contribution to the catalog, sustained a 10,000-year-old native culture that was erased in the name of white American settlement and progress and was subsequently transformed by what Diener poignantly centers in her recent work—one of the most dramatic alterations of earth’s natural terrain in human history.
