By Susan Swagler
Annie Kammerer Butrus knows art affects people. Her latest collection of works explores just how much.
She is exhibiting a show called “Internal: External” at the Palazzo Bembo in Venice through Nov. 25. She’s showing in the European Cultural Centre’s Personal Structures exhibition, concurrently with the Venice Biennale.
Butrus teamed up with longtime collaborator and award-winning documentary filmmaker Michele Forman for the project. Forman is director of media studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, an interdisciplinary minor she co-founded in 2003.
Forman began her film work at Harvard University, where she double majored in English and filmmaking. Her documentary work has been broadcast on HBO, Independent Film Channel, PBS and Sundance Channel, among others.
Butrus also worked with a handful of UAB doctors for this latest body of work.
“I have collaborated with Michele for 25 years,” Butrus said. “For the Venice show, I opened up my collaboration to include Dr. James Markert (James Garber Galbraith Endowed Chair of Neurosurgery Professor at UAB) and Dr. Laili Markert (neuropsychologist). Dr. Jonathon Roth (UAB assistant professor in neurobiology) was also integral to helping me understand the role of the landscape in our emotional brain health. He team-taught with Michele last year at UAB’s Honor’s College.”
All the doctors helped guide Butrus’ study of the brain through cognition and emotion mapping; she integrated this into her own overlapping shadow-and-landscape studies. The goal was to better understand the brain, emotions and the impact of nature and art on the brain
Pandemic Awareness
The pandemic pushed her toward this project.
She saw how pandemic restrictions personally affected her friends who are doctors and frontline workers.
“I was very aware of how they were experiencing the landscape from an internal standpoint looking out, particularly the stories about how if they could just look outside, how impactful that was,” Butrus said. “I was aware, being a landscape painter, of that impact.”
That, coupled with her own emotional experiences during that time, led her to “thinking about painting internal landscapes and merging this external with internal space,” she said.
“And so, it went from painting theoretical emotions to really wanting something more accurate.”
For “Internal: External,” Butrus started with photographic images from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of emotional markers. She then merged these emotional markers with her shadow tracings of Alabama landscapes.
“That allows me to trace the emotion, which is a snapshot, just the way I trace shadows,” she said.
“The thing I’m really looking at with this current work, ‘Internal: External,’ is the increased knowledge and research that’s gone into appreciating the therapeutic effects of landscape therapy with brain injury, with any type of healing.”
It’s about the increased awareness of the beneficial impacts that come from exposure to the landscape, she said.
“To me, it’s very exciting. And that is a key point that I’m interested in understanding more about.”
An Appreciation for Alabama
Butrus, who fell in love with the Alabama landscape when she moved here 25 years ago, has always been interested in the intersection of place, landscape and memory. Her studies of peach farmers in Chiton County are moving and beautiful.
In fact, she has been documenting the Alabama landscape through painting and shadow tracings for two decades. In addition to her in-depth series about the peach growers, she has focused on Dothan peanut farmers, Jasmine Hill Gardens, the Wetumpka Impact Crater and Oak Mountain State Park. Some of these works are part of the Venice exhibit.
“I really just started with a simple question of what happens when the landscape changes and our place changes and how we change with it,” Butrus said. “I think it was really in response to me moving to a new place geographically. I think for me, the most exciting thing was when I put into place the shadow tracing. It synthesizes the idea of capturing a fleeting moment in time, which is just a great metaphor for change.”
Butrus traveled the state for her landscape studies, including those that are part of “Internal: External,” but she points out that, like her physician friends during the pandemic, you don’t have to go far to find landscapes that will resonate emotionally.
“For me, the most interesting thing is that it’s sort of a duality where I love to be within the landscape, experiencing it firsthand … hiking, walking. But I have four children, and I am in the car all the time. One thing that has been ongoing is that I experience the landscape sort of secondhand as a driver just as much as being within the landscape.”
A Working Artist
Butrus, who lives in Mountain Brook with her husband, Greg, and four children, is originally from Illinois. She received her master’s in painting and printmaking from the University of Notre Dame and her bachelor’s in studio art from Wellesley College.
Notable public and private collections around the world hold Butrus’ work, including Art Bridges, where the pieces in Venice will eventually go; Alice L. Walton School of Medicine; Children’s of Alabama; UAB’s Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts; and Baptist MD Anderson Cancer Center in Jacksonville, Florida.
She has received an Alabama State Council on the Arts award and has taught at the University of Notre Dame, Space One Eleven and the Birmingham Museum of Art. She and Forman have been longtime volunteers and supporters of arts programming in the Mountain Brook Schools system, especially with the Expressions Arts Contest.
Butrus is working on a commission that will celebrate the 10th anniversary of UAB’s Arts in Medicine program, which uses creative arts to improve the well-being of patients, families and staff. You can see her work in the Abroms Patrons Lounge at the Alys Stephens Center. There’s a piece permanently installed in the emergency room waiting area at Children’s.
“It’s something I’m very proud of,” Butrus said. “I really like being in medical places.”
When her Venice works go to Art Bridges in Bentonville, Arkansas, she will be involved with some art therapy programming there. She’s especially excited to work with scientists and doctors who are doing research into the therapeutic effects of the landscape.
Butrus said she hopes people look at her work and become more aware of the potential that everyone has to be deeply affected by the landscape.
“Right now, I’m making shadow tracings of the landscapes that are around the parking decks around UAB (Hospital). I’m thinking about when patients are going in to see their doctors or going in for surgery.”
“Unfortunately, most everyone has been in that state – you’re concerned, you’re concerned about a loved one. And so, I keep thinking about the ability to just look and reflect on what’s around us. The potential for that to bring some peace. That’s really what I’m interested in – building and raising awareness and making those connections.”
You can see more of Butrus’ work at her website, akbutrus.com/index.php.
