Anna Homler

Anna Homler (Born November 1, 1948, in Los Angeles, California) is a visual, performance, and vocal artist living and working in Los Angeles. She has performed music and exhibited her artworks in venues around the world. She earned a B.A. at the University of California, Berkeley, 1970, in Anthropology, and an M.A. in Education and Languages at Boston University, 1973. She graduated from Alexander Hamilton High School, Los Angeles.

In 1989, Homler was part of the Direct Sound project which took Homler to Europe with the musical performance group organized by avant-garde vocalist David Moss and including vocalists Shelley Hirsch, Carles Santos and Greetje Bijma; they performed at the Taktlos Festival in Switzerland as well as several other venues in Europe. Homler participated in many music festivals in Europe including Milanopoesia in Milan, Italy, the Festival International des Musiques Actuelle, Nancy, France, and the LMC Annual Festival of Experimental Music, South Bank, London.

John Payne wrote in the L.A. Weekly "Anna Homler, L.A.-based but not often heard locally (she's a popular-in-Europe type), sings, in an invented language that 'nobody knows but everyone understands,' and plays a nice little assortment of wind-up clocks, toys and other mechanical doodads; her output is filtered through electronic devices..."

In Option Dean Suzuki wrote: "Homler is a Los Angeles-based performance artist in whose work art plays a central role. In all of her work, Homler creates a persona who expresses herself in a newley invented language that appears to be rife with tradition, ritual, ceremony and a culture all its own. The language is couched in lyrical and somewhat exotic melodies sung with a pure vocal style sans vibrato, which gives the work an ambience of authentic folk tradition" .

In 1982, while driving through Topanga Canyon in her '61 Caddy, Anna Homler experienced and auto-epiphany: "I began spontaneously singing and chanting in a language I'd never heard before--word and rhythm were one." This experience...prompted her to create an ancient, storytelling character named "Breadwoman" who...earned Homler acclaim as a "linguistic alchemist."

Kateri Butler continues in an article in the L.A. Weekly, "Like the French deconstructionist movement, Anna transcends the mere word: 'I deal with the poetic, which releases us from the narrowness of our perceptions'."

Homler's assemblage work has been included in a number of museum exhibitions, including 40 Years of California Assemblage, organized by the UCLA Frederick Wight Art Gallery at UCLA, which traveled to the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, Calif., Fresno Art Museum, Fresno, Calif. and the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska. Her work was also included in the exhibition Outside the Frame, Performance and the Object: A Survey History of Performance Art in the USA since 1950, at the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, 1994, Cleveland, Ohio.

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