Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Video, Film, Drawing, Performance, Collage, Painting
Website: pastineprojects.com/anne-mcguire
Anne McGuire was born in Minnesota (in what she calls “the Valley of the Jolly Green Giant”) and began making videos in the late 1980s while studying video art and photography at the Kansas City Art Institute. She moved west to San Francisco to pursue graduate study in the Performance/Video department at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she earned her MFA. She has lived and worked in San Francisco since 1990.
McGuire has held faculty positions at the San Francisco Art Institute, the University of California Santa Cruz, and Stanford University. In fall 2004 she relocated briefly to Busan, South Korea, teaching video art at KyungSung University for eighteen months before returning to San Francisco. Her work has been exhibited and screened at SFMOMA, BAMPFA, the Asian Art Museum, the Wattis Institute, MoMA New York, the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Getty in Los Angeles, and numerous international film festivals including the San Francisco International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, Impakt Festival in Utrecht, and Viper Festival in Lucerne.
For two decades she performed as the cabaret act The Freddy McGuire Show alongside San Francisco electronic musician Jon Leidecker (Wobbly), presenting original songs live and on radio. Her practice has been described as “eclectic and varied,” spanning experimental cinema, obsessive drawing, poetry, and prose.
McGuire’s work moves fluidly across media — video, film, drawing, collage, painting, performance, and writing — united by a fascination with formal systems and how inverting or subverting them opens new perceptual and emotional possibilities. Her best-known video works deconstruct Hollywood disaster films by re-editing them shot-by-shot in precise reverse chronological order, producing a vertiginous experience of effects before causes that is simultaneously absurd and mesmerizing. This approach, which she calls “disaster deconstruction,” turns narrative cinema’s conventions inside out without ever literally running footage backward.
Her drawing practice is equally rule-governed: dense parallel lines — accented with vibrant teals, yellows, and pinks — resolve into bird-like creatures, shamanistic figures, and optical illusions that serve as coded portraits of friends in San Francisco’s artistic community. Inspired in part by the obsessively detailed architectural renderings of self-taught San Francisco artist Achilles G. Rizzoli (1896–1981), McGuire’s drawings explore symmetry, symbolism, and the geometry of the grid. Across all her media, the work balances wit and rigor: playful on its surface, structurally precise underneath.
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