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Deborah Anzinger (artist)

Deborah Anzinger is a Jamaican artist based in Kingston. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art (Brooklyn, New York), Royal West of England Academy (Bristol, England), the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas (Nassau City, The Bahamas), the National Gallery of Jamaica, (Kingston, Jamaica) and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, (Washington, DC). Her work has also been included in reviews in The New Yorker, ''Frieze Magazine, Huffington Post and Artforum and published in Small Axe Journal (Duke University Press) and Caribbean Quarterly'' (Taylor & Francis). Anzinger is also the recipient of several awards, most notably the Pollock Krasner Grant in 2018, and a Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture Fellowship in 2016.

Anzinger is also the founding director of the Kingston-based non-profit contemporary art organization New Local Space (NLS).

Biography and Background
Anzinger (née Carroll) was born in 1978 to musician and environmental chemist Paul Carrol, and creative consultant Donna Carroll. She is the oldest of their three daughters.

Though Anzinger has painted since she was a child, she first pursued a career in biochemistry, completing a Ph.D. in Immunology & Microbiology at Rush University Medical Centre in Chicago (2006). During her doctoral studies, however, she began to engage her painting more seriously, taking courses in Flemish painting at an informal art school, and moving to the Pilsen neighbourhood where she immersed herself in the vibrant art community. By the time she moved to Washington DC at the end of her studies, she’d attracted the attention of gallerists and collectors both in the U.S. and back home in Jamaica. While in D.C. exhibited at the Arlington Art Center, George Mason University, Civilian Art Projects, Hillyer Art Space, Delicious Spectacle, Porch Projects, Corcoran Gallery of Art with Transformer Gallery, and the District of Columbia Arts Center.

In 2012, Anzinger returned to Jamaica with her husband and young daughter. Having enjoyed the support of a community of fellow artists and creators in DC and Chicago, Anzinger was keen to facilitate similar experiences for herself and others in Jamaica. New Local Space was founded with that aim in mind shortly after her arrival in Jamaica.

Birth of a New Fantasy (2013)
This installation was part of New Roots, an exhibition of emerging Jamaican artists at the National Gallery of Jamaica. The work juxtaposes banality and wildness through automated abstraction. They collide digital media, text and physical experience made material. Anzinger is interested in undermining pre-existing systems by using their own structure against them, with the intention of "making space within them for freer ways of looking and being." This body of work includes elements that have come to recur throughout Anzinger's oeuvre. Fractured mirrors, for example, hold an important place in her practice, as a device for disrupting subject/object binaries, collapsing the artwork and its audience, the viewer and the viewed. Wilson Harris' The Palace of the Peacock has also been an ongoing inspiration.

My works are surreal artefacts of this contemplative process that examine psychological fragility and the desire for transcendence and existential freedom. For the last few years, fractured mirrors have reappeared in my work as a device and conceit for orienting and disorienting oneself in the present. Recently influenced by the surrealist literary work The Palace of the Peacock by Wilson Harris, this current work expands on mirroring and fracturing as it relates to notions of proliferating imagery, substance and ideology: The works physically reflect fragments of a lived environment while situating these fragments into a new, liminal space created out of play. The works chart the movement of discrete elements from passive discourse with each other into active intercourse and then into limitless proliferation – a potential metaphor for the actualization of a new beginning.