Roy Ananda

Portrait photograph of Roy Ananda sitting on a step ladder.
Portrait photograph of Roy Ananda sitting on a step ladder.
Portrait photograph of Roy Ananda sitting on a step ladder. (ACSA)

Roy Ananda (b. 1980) is a South Australian artist, educator, and writer best known for his explorations of popular culture fandom. Drawing on his wide-ranging interests and hobbies – in particular his love of the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons, works of science-fiction and horror by H. P. Lovecraft, the Star Wars franchise, comics and cartoons such as Looney Tunes, Tintin and Asterix, as well as the 1980s and ‘90s hip-hop music – over the past two decades Ananda has produced materially and conceptually driven works that explore his identity as a fan. 

 

Born and raised in Adelaide, Ananda began making art at a young age – he held his first solo exhibition of paintings and drawings at only fifteen years old. Upon completing high school he embarked on undergraduate studies at Adelaide Central School of Art, where, since 2004, he has lectured in sculpture and drawing and today holds the position of Head of Drawing. 

Ananda’s early works are typified by process-based drawing, sculpture, and installation, whereby Ananda sets himself strict parameters or rules of play. Taking a cue from the instructional wall drawings of Sol LeWitt or Richard Serra’s Verblist (1967-68) – a list of verbs to be used as a creative prompt – Ananda’s self-imposed rules were similarly strategic in opening up the processes of making to forces of chance, “sculpture is an action as much as it is an outcome”[1]. In Twelve Tasks (2007), for example, Ananda made use of lingering detritus in his studio, including material refuses from previous works, to dictate an over-engineered sculptural form. A governing colour scheme in butter yellow, acid green, pink, white, grey, and cornflower blue was drawn from his favourite pair of sneakers at the time and used as a schema in determining its composition. “Play is a central principle of almost all my work… It can be a childish, frivolous thing. But, it is also a very productive intellectual tool”[2].

Ananda’s sense of play and procedural approach to sculpture is taken to an extreme in his large-scale installation Thin walls between dimensions, created for the 2018 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Divided Worlds. Installed in the subterranean galleries of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Thin walls between dimensions transformed an early iteration of a Dungeons & Dragons gridded battle map, designed by Gary Gygax in 1979, from a two-dimensional plane into an increasingly three-dimensional environment. Ananda routed elements of the map onto sheets of blue-print-toned MDF and devised a complex numerical and geometric system of angles and miters to generate the enveloping immersive landscape. It was a “blunt analog for the way the fantasy setting can take on a level of reality in the player’s imagination”[3]. As audiences moved deeper into Thin walls between dimensions, Ananda imagined it as one of the “great mythological descents into the underworld, like Orpheus going down to rescue Eurydice”[4].

A multi-material and multi-coloured sculpture installed on wooden floorboards.
A multi-material and multi-coloured sculpture installed on wooden floorboards.
Roy Ananda, 'Twelve Tasks'. Courtesy the artist.

The map represented an imaginary space but one that has been inhabited in the minds of probably tens of millions of people…It is a game that has loomed large in my imagination since I was about ten years old. I feel certain that childhood and adolescence spent playing these kinds of games – inhabiting those imaginary spaces and designing them – have impacted my life as a sculptor [5].

In the same year, Ananda began an ongoing series of diagrammatic drawings – Annotations (2018 – current). For the exhibition Roy Ananda: Further Annotations (2021), Ananda was invited into the Art Gallery of South Australia’s collection to select and annotate two works: Peter Booth’s Painting 1982, whose dystopian, cannibalistic scenes appeared both shocking and amazing to Ananda as a young visitor to the gallery; and Olafur Elliason’s Dark Matter Collective, an installation of 217 glass orbs with light-bending properties that, for Ananda, invoked the magic and multiverses of science fiction and fantasy.

 

To produce the annotations, Ananda traced, scaled, and redrew component parts of each work in his signature colour – Uni Posca Light Blue No. 8 – and then attributed them with references to music, literature, objects, scenes, and characters from cinema and television – a fandom paint by numbers.

It feels very authentic to the way I apprehend the world. For example, for people of my generation or interests, everything could be analogised with The Simpsons. It’s very postmodern. To some people, this tendency might suggest that I am so inculcated in popular media that I don’t have an authentic experience because it is mediated by fiction. But the other side is that it’s just a fun lens to put on things and quite a joyful way to be in the world. That said, it’s also a bit ambivalent; [Annotations] is a bit of a self-deprecating take on me being the uber fan – both the absurdity and the pleasure of it [6].

detail view multi-material and multi-coloured sculpture installed on wooden floorboards.
detail view multi-material and multi-coloured sculpture installed on wooden floorboards.
Roy Ananda, 'Twelve Tasks'. Courtesy the artist.

The Annotations series can be read in a tradition of conceptualism too. As highly pared-back pictograms, the works draw on the minimal visual language of conceptualism while also encouraging the viewer to travel with Ananda, skipping and jumping from reference to reference, evoking whole worlds in the mind’s eye. 

I like playing off the austere trappings of conceptualism – the dry text, the reduced post-object art – and colliding it with things that are ostensibly pulpier in their genre… One of my favourite descriptions of my work was by artist and academic Simon Biggs, “It is like capital C conceptualism but with a gooey center” [7].

In 2022, Ananda produced Electronic void illusion (2021-2022) for ACE Open’s Metaverse, an exhibition reflecting on the internet as a coercive force in our lives. Over the course of six months, Ananda took one thousand internet quizzes that fell broadly into three distinct categories: non-fiction quizzes, ‘Which Piece of IKEA Furniture Are You?’; diegetic quizzes that delve into fictional worlds of film and literature, ‘Are you more Jay or Silent Bob?’; and lastly, quizzes loosely based on the pop-psychology phenomena of the Myer-Briggs personality test. Ananda materialised the data using reams of dot-matrix-printed quiz questions and a suite of modular boards mapping a network of screen-captured quiz results, set on an isometric grid. 

 

Ananda’s manual translations of digital data not only draw on his personal nostalgia and fandom but also echo early figurations of the internet as a burgeoning technological tool. Using a distinct hyper green, yellow, grey, and black colour palette, the isometric grid conjures a 1990s architectural metaphor of the internet as an ‘information superhighway’, as well as a science fiction imagery of the internet, such as the illuminated ones and zeroes of The Matrix. 

"Doing one thousand quizzes is an arbitrary number, but hopefully, one that suggests obsession, like penance. It is something you would do in the metaphysical or spiritual sphere, like some sort of self-actualisation journey. There is also a melancholy idea about the cyberspace that was promised and then where we’ve ended up"[8].

"Electronic void illusion (2021–2022) is a digital self-portrait turned analog. Akin to the self-reflexive fandom of Annotations, it is “…like coming to grips with yourself against which Adam Sandler character you are"[9].

  • A wall with pages of writing by Roy Ananda.
A wall with pages of writing by Roy Ananda.
Roy Ananda, Supreme Library ( 2020 - 2021), ACE, Adelaide, installation view, 2021. Photography by Grant Hancock, Courtesy the artist.

[1] Ananda, R , unpublished interview, with Belinda Howden, Adelaide, 18 September, 2021.

[2] Ibid.

[3] First Fridays Online: In-Conversation with Roy Ananda and Andrew Purvis, Art Gallery of South Australia. Video, 50:09, 6 August 2021 https://vimeo.com/587607835.

[4] Roy Ananda – Thin walls between dimensions, Art Gallery of South Australia. Filmed as part of the 2018 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Divided Worlds. Video, 00:47. Published 30 May 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4hwd1oCwME.

[5] First Fridays Online: In-Conversation with Roy Ananda and Andrew Purvis (2021)

[6] Ananda, R, unpublished interview (2021)

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ananda, R, unpublished interview (2021) 7 January 2022.

[9] Ibid.

Bibliography


Books

  • Purvis, A et. al, Roy Ananda. Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2021.

Articles and Essays

Websites

Videos and Podcasts

Interviews

  • Ananda, R, unpublished interview, with Belinda Howden,and Roy Ananda. Audio, 2:07:22. Adelaide, 18 September 2021.

Roy Ananda
Related Exhibition
Metaverse
Related Public Programs
Artist Talks: Metaverse

9 April to 14 May 2022

Curated by Patrice Sharkey

See Exhibition

9 April to 9 April 2022

Join the exhibition’s curator Patrice Sharkey for a tour of Metaverse, with talks from participating artists Roy Ananda (SA), Britt d’Argaville (VIC) and Giselle Stanborough (NSW)

See Public Program

  • Printer paper with writing vertically lines the gallery wall.
  • A tunnel is lined with printer paper to the left and images diagrams to the right. The wall is painted black with white writing at the end of the tunnel.
Printer paper with writing vertically lines the gallery wall.
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Roy Ananda, 'Electronic void illusion' (2020–2021), exhibition view, ACE Open, Adelaide, 2022. Photography by Grant Hancock.

ACE tampinthi, ngadlu Kaurna yartangka panpapanpalyarninthi (inparrinthi). Kaurna miyurna yaitya mathanya Wama Tarntanyaku. Parnaku yailtya, parnaku tapa purruna, parnaku yarta ngadlu tampinthi. Yalaka Kaurna miyurna itu yailtya, tapa purruna, yarta kuma puru martinthi, puru warri-apinthi, puru tangka martulayinthi.

ACE respectfully acknowledges the traditional Country of the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains and pays respect to Elders past and present. We recognise and respect their cultural heritage, beliefs and relationship with the land. We acknowledge that they are of continuing importance to the Kaurna people living today.

ACE tampinthi, ngadlu Kaurna yartangka panpapanpalyarninthi (inparrinthi). Kaurna miyurna yaitya mathanya Wama Tarntanyaku. Parnaku yailtya, parnaku tapa purruna, parnaku yarta ngadlu tampinthi. Yalaka Kaurna miyurna itu yailtya, tapa purruna, yarta kuma puru martinthi, puru warri-apinthi, puru tangka martulayinthi.

ACE respectfully acknowledges the traditional Country of the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains and pays respect to Elders past and present. We recognise and respect their cultural heritage, beliefs and relationship with the land. We acknowledge that they are of continuing importance to the Kaurna people living today.