It’s very early in my interview with local artist Anna O’Cain when I realize that I’m unsure how to adequately classify her art.
In my notes are a series of questions about her work and practice; cleverly worded queries that serve as cheat codes for an arts writer. The hopeful intent is that it will prompt the artist herself to categorize it herself. After all, who better to succinctly describe the art than the artist who produced it?
“It’s so hard,” O’Cain says, laughing. “I wrote a sentence down one time. Maybe it’s still on my wall somewhere. It said something like I think what I’m trying to do is learn more things about the world and I’m trying to dispel the mythological picture of the world that was painted for me by my mom about how good you have to be and how you benefit from being good.”
This answer seems insufficient at first, but when further prompted, O’Cain its it’s a “very good question” before quickly transitioning into a story about her mother helping a man put out a fire with wet towels on their way back from a swimming pool when O’Cain was in elementary school. This story segues into a discourse about discovering video art at Oklahoma University in the early 1970s. Then this story bleeds back into reflections of her mother and how these memories inspired “nighttime,” a 2014 installation at Art Produce in North Park.
So, I’ll just remark here that O’Cain’s art is conceptual in spirit — eloquently blending in collage, sculpture and even performance-based elements — and yet it still defies pigeon-holing. Much like the artist herself, her work is charmingly tangential, equal parts bewildering and bewitching.
“I am a storyteller,” O’Cain says, matter of factly, from her home and studio in Lemon Grove. “I’m not saying I’m a great one, but I’m from the South. And I like to tell stories.”
So, yes, Anna O’Cain is a storyteller and her art is but a manifestation of the inner machinations of her interminably inspired mind. One of the biggest artistic sins is ignoring an instinct and O’Cain never dismisses a muse. She writes notes to herself on a pad constantly, doing so throughout our interview. She does this because, well, one never knows what might happen.. A simple idea, however inconsequential it seems at the time, can soon morph, transform and then cascade into an entirely different artistic statement altogether.
“When I start to get really engaged and then start to feel really ionate about something, I just have to trust it,” O’Cain says.
Such is the case with “There’s Never Just One,” a new exhibition at the Athenaeum Art Center in Logan Heights.
Made up of seemingly different parts, a casual visitor might immediately think it was a group show showcasing multiple artists. In one area there are soap boxes mysteriously placed underneath stacked, fragmented photographs hung on the wall. Toward the middle of the room, there is a table, complete with a sitting chair, with a deluge of keys and keyrings spilling from the ceiling and onto the table. In another area, there is a bookshelf, somewhat domestic looking at first glance, until closer inspection reveals a variety of random elements within the shelves (plants, floating books, installations within installations).
“I think my work now is more disparate now than it’s ever been,” O’Cain says. “It’s scary to me sometimes.”
Walking within the exhibition, the viewer is grasped with a looky-loo feeling of wanting to take it all in, not quite grasping how it all adds up, but knowing they’re all connected in some ethereal way. “There’s Never Just One,” which is up through November 25, is like O’Cain herself: fascinating in its obscurity.
“I knew it was going to be a real hardcore installation where it all had to work together, although it really does feel like a group show but from one person,” says O’Cain. “‘There’s Never Just One’ really is about that fact, that one idea can lead to another and that we’re all integrated. It’s corny and it’s hokey, but it’s also truthful and representative of the way I work.”
And with that explanation, O’Cain is onto another story about how a small fascination with plankton soon morphed into an overarching, all-encoming, everything-everywhere-all-at-once tidal wave of ideas that ended up making up “There’s Never Just One.”
“It’s this idea that this could be as important as anything else,” says O’Cain. “The equalization of things and that there’s never just one way to look at things.”
The daughter of an architect father and a theater-loving mother from the “backwoods of Mississippi,” O’Cain grew up in the South during the Civil Rights era, first in Jackson, Miss., and later moving to the Gulf Coast. She went on to study art at both Oklahoma University and the Art Institute of Chicago, before moving to San Diego in 1983 to get her master’s degree in visual art from the University of California, San Diego. After a brief sojourn in Montana, she came back to San Diego, began teaching art at community colleges (she officially retired in 2020), while also keeping up with her own practice. This has resulted in myriad solo and collaborative exhibitions throughout the years.
“I came back and just said ‘yes’ to everything, all the shows I was asked to be in,” O’Cain says. “I’ve never been super ambitious, but I just went for it.”
Despite a Southern accent that longs to fully surface whenever she speaks, O’Cain maintains that it was in San Diego where her practice really took shape, but also turns contemplative when asked if her distinct Southern upbringing helped shape her artistic outlook.
“I didn’t really grow up in a visual art world, but I did grow up with some people doing interesting things,” O’Cain recalls. “ My dad would bring his work home, so I was doing my own floor plans from the second grade. I would design these fanciful houses in my head.”
While that last sentence is delivered casually, this “fanciful” approach does speak volumes about O’Cain’s approach to her art now.
While her house was filled with creative people, she does also recall the sometimes casual racism among her neighbors and even the elder of her family. She addressed some of these formative memories in “There Are No Snakes in the Garden,” a 1992 solo show at the Galería de Arte de la Ciudad in Tijuana, and later revisited at Cal State San Marcos. The installation, which resembled an altar, saw O’Cain navigating the dualities of race and family, the positive and the negative, via stories, paintings and audio installations centering on her maternal grandparents.
And while “There’s Never Just One” doesn’t declaratively speak to this unique experience in the same ways as “There Are No Snakes in the Garden,” one can’t help but wonder whether her early experiences, however subconsciously, did help to shape her approach throughout her career.
“It’s a great question to think about,” O’Cain its while jotting down a note. “The soapbox things that are floating around the room at the new show, it’s not spelled out that you can stand on those and recite a poem. The idea is that it’s an open invitation that you don’t have to be anything in order to stand up.”
With that, O’Cain begins to tell another story about teaching at Miracosta College in Oceanside. This segues into another story about her mother listening to Martin Luther King Jr. speeches, which then segues into a story about how she lived in a church when she first moved to San Diego, which then transitions back into a story about a conversation she had with her mother later in life where her mother quoted that same King speech, and on it goes from there.
It’s like she said at the beginning: she’s a storyteller, and while the point might seem elusive at first, take a minute to take it all in and the dots start to connect.
“You’ve asked me some great questions and I appreciate it,” O’Cain tells me as we say goodbye, but then points to her notebook. “But now I have some new work to do.”
Anna O’Cain: There’s Never Just One/Nunca hay sólo uno
When: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays. Through Nov. 25
Where: Catherine and Robert Palmer Gallery, Athenaeum Art Center, 1955 Julian Ave., Logan Heights
Phone: (619) 269-1981
Online: ljathenaeum.org/current-exhibitions/#art-center
Anna O’Cain
Age: 69
Born: Pascagoula, Miss.
Fun Fact: In addition to her conceptual installations, O’Cain has also collaborated on multiple public art projects. Most recently, she was one-third of “To Do • A Mending Project,” a fiber art collaboration with Michelle Montjoy and Siobhán Arnold that resulted in a series of community workshops and art installations.
Combs is a freelance writer.
