Over the past three years, Anna Conway has explored the idea of re-wilding, the reintroduction of animals to nature, to their innate habits and their habitats. These paintings feature animals and their trainers, at times in spite of the fact that certain animals—an enormous albino whale, for example—are untrainable. In the fiction of painting, Conway knows that anything is possible because, like a writer, what is imagined can be accurately described and shared with the reader/viewer.


We consider the visual realm in parallel to “if you build it, they will come.” If you paint it believably, and no matter how fantastic the scene, they will see what the artist has seen in her mind’s eye. These newest paintings all feature a camera, or a drone being flown above, which films what’s taking place. Every image before us is a painting, a story, and a scene in what will be a filmed document of the re-wilding efforts. It should go without saying that the artist has great empathy for animals, particularly in a period when nature is imperiled.

Flight (2024) presents a near-operatic scene. A huge scaffolding and illuminated curtain has been constructed in what appears to be the ocean, improbably. Large whitish blue rocky outcroppings rise to the left and right, creating an amphitheater. At the very top of the scaffolding is a large screen on which we see projected the activity below: a trainer with a bird, wings spread wide, perched on its arm. The trainer wears an owl mask and a monk-like cowl, its hood pulled up, green, like the translucent curtain, so that they will disappear on film.


On either side of the trainer are two hooded falcons. Towards the bottom of the rocks to the right, we see that a small boat has arrived with more falcons and their handlers, each wearing an orange life vest. Such a scene wouldn’t need be set on such a grand scale, out at sea, and at night (unless it’s covert, a secret operation, an X-file?), and just who is the large projection above the scaffolding meant to be viewed by? But because this is exactly how it appeared to the artist as she imagined and slowly discovered the image as it unfolded before her, this is what she shares with us—almost as if she’s saying, Can you believe what I saw? Her pared down title may suggest more than the flight of the bird, its learning to fly again, but an idea of escape, to flee from imminent danger we may all inevitably confront.

Alexa, Siri, Landscape (2018) is also a nocturne, though an interior that plays with a highly dramatic image of the natural world. To view this painting is to be seated at a desk at night, a room suffused in blue-black light. There are two woodgrain covered speakers and a Newton’s Cradle, the device that demonstrates the conservation and transferral of energy in physics, named for Sir Isaac Newton, as it allows us to visualize his laws of motion. In the eerie light, the small silver balls and metal structure, its diminutive scale, are in great contrast to the background, dominated by a painting of a wild sea at night. The colossal wave rising up, an ominous wall of water, is another demonstration of force and momentum entirely, the sublimity of nature and how small we are in relation to its power.


Conway frequently includes an image within her images—a painting, a poster, a calendar, a wallpaper landscape—one that is more than meta-representation, a painting within another, and here we clearly see a gold frame at the very top of this one. For Conway, this is a means to introduce a palpable sense of dislocation from where we find ourselves, or to imply that whoever inhabits the environments she pictures would rather be somewhere else. She contrasts inside/outside, or the presence of the past, distant points in time, monuments serving as markers within space-time, referencing other civilizations. (Some of the pictures within pictures refer to Easter Island, Stonehenge, the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, and the giant Sequoias of the Redwood Forest.) In this painting, the image of a menacing rogue wave is in stark contrast with the stillness of the home office with its “Executive desktop toy,” the uncluttered surface offering a glimpse of the absent figure as someone for whom control is preferred and maintained.


And yet why was this painting chosen, this image of a total loss of control, a reminder of our mortality? The artist placed it there. This is her stage. Her story. And whoever sits at that desk is her character, present even in haunted absence. The uninhabited scene is further amplified by Conway’s title, implicitly referencing non-human intelligence, virtual assistant technology. What question might we imagine being asked of it? Siri, what can I do when a forty-foot wave is about to come crashing down upon me?


—Bob Nickas