Rachel Anne York's Projects

MFA Alumni

Major: Printmaking

Graduation Year: 2020

Artist Statement:

My work and practice center around perspective, awareness, place, community, and the climate crisis. I believe that humans are unable to adapt and react to these changing circumstances because we are stuck in unacknowledged grief and anxiety over the massive losses we are experiencing. Seeking to activate multiple levels of awareness, I use story, sound, music, architecture, archives, performance, and drawing to facilitate immersive, ephemeral, shared experiences. I am investigating human concepts of the non-human world, specifically through modes of storytelling and communal acts, and how the decline of such acts impact our concepts of nature. I believe the transference of oral tradition deriving from generations of collective memory is both disrupted and enabled by technological advances, and that there are both opportunity and loss in that tension.

Biography:

Rachel Anne York is a transdisciplinary artist and musician from North Carolina, currently living and working in Portland, Maine. Her work incorporates drawing, print, sound, music, place, performance, and installation, creating communal experiences of ecological emotions. She received her undergraduate degrees in Music Performance (Double Bass) and Art & Design from East Carolina University in 2012, and a Master in Fine Arts in Studio Art at the Maine College of Art in 2020. Influenced by her Southern Appalachian heritage, she has also benefited from study and work in Brazil and Italy. York is the recipient of the McClelland Roberts Memorial Scholarship, Lane Family Music Scholarship, and the MFA Dean’s Scholarship.