Anne Mathern’s recent work in photo, video and sound  emerges from common sub-cultural pasts of her bona fide “American generation: things that count for cultural history in a country that has a fairly itinerant population and shallow-rooted history. Things such as how we all did drugs in high school or skateboarded or rave danced or how we all had to go to Catholic school or CCD and learn all the same church songs; they are means for coming-of-age as a generation but it’s also a testament to the development of a national cultural identity.

Mathern’s current work turns towards the nuance of identity in culture, attempting to both adopt histories and establish new traditions—to synthesize rooted notions of spirituality with bits of iconoclastic subculture. Her focus is an almost anthropological study of what her culture believes it is and what the roots of that belief are.