Ann wrote the statement below in 2021:

For over thirty years, I exhibited at A.I.R. Gallery, a women's cooperative founded in New York City in 1972. Working on various projects with a community of engaged and committed women, we established a meaningful dialogue across diverse visual languages. A.I.R. Gallery allowed me to pursue a deeply personal unfolding -- a journey of individuation -- within the rigor of a three-year exhibition cycle. Delving into matters of self and being, my confrontation with beauty, grief, agency, imagination and feeling gained a voice in the public space.

Where does the spiral journey of selfhood begin? Could it have been my childhood certainty that plants like the Mountain Laurel swayed and spoke with each other; hearing the classical music of QXR spilling from my father's studio window; or exploring the underbrush around our Woodstock home and coming upon a collection of his used and discarded paint tubes, each holding some marvelous color that struck a chord in me where there were no words. Was it breathing in the boundless space of water and sky while living at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico, the nights filled with the sound of the ocean's breath as it reached the shore? Or was it the 60s when it was all about sex, drugs, rock and roll and then, quietly, the possibility of meditation?

I chose meditation, opening a lifetime of personal engagement with ancient wisdom practices. It was this space beyond words that drew me, the source of a deep longing that had begun in childhood for an ongoing relationship and dialogue with the ineffable. Walking and looking, looking and wandering, one is connected to the vastness of everything. For one moment, catching sight of a cyclist riding along Fifth Avenue, coattails in a dance with the wind, opening and closing, hiding and revealing. I recognized that this opening and closing had something to do with my own nature.

With eyes, hands, body, I began an engagement with stillness, with waiting and contemplation, creating the heat that invited intuition, the leap that establishes a dialogue between self and that which lies beyond the known. It was from this alchemy, this paradox of making visible that which is unseen, that I experienced connection.

Inherent in the relationship of the the artist and their tools, such as the mallet and the sharpened chisel, is a continually summoned courage, intelligence and will. Art making creates a place of quietude, of contemplation, space and time to resonate with subtle voices. The practice and viewing of art opens us to the opportunity of becoming friends with that place within the self that knows. I bow to that place, that river, that place of leaping, that artists have claimed from the beginning.

Ann Pachner