Introducing: Anni Pasto
My name is Anni Pasto, and I’m a creator and a lover from Provo Utah. I love jankiness. I love when people do and make shocking, gross things that challenge our assumptions of beauty and what it means to love. The more we can chip away and break the facade of our society’s porcelain skin, the more we will discover the cosmic jellyfish we all are underneath. I’m currently acting out the process of loving the monster I am, and the monsters others can be.
Featured Work:
Patchwork Heart
My eye focuses on your patchwork heart, on my patchwork heart, on our patchwork hearts.
I’m trying to see where the pain came from, how it is reflected back in the form of harm. How we create systems for ourselves, others, and society that hide away the agonizing pain of wanting to be loved in a world that represses our most authentic expressions of humanity.
Maybe I can take our hearts apart, rearrange them, and stitch them back together in different configurations that sew us all together. I am messy, making mistakes, stumbling, destroying things, and rebuilding them in order to find new ways for me to love myself and others.
I made these dollhouses in a flurry of repressed pain and grief I was experiencing after a turbulent trip I took back to California to visit my family. The conversations and experiences I had on my trip reminded me of the false walls of safety, security, and sanity my family tried to construct for me growing up. The home they built was out of love, but also constructed in a way that denied and disregarded our echoing generational wounds.
(What you’re seeing is the end result of me hot-gluing dollhouse pieces together, painting them black, weaving a roof of flowers, roses, and squash together with yarn, intuitively cutting up and gluing fabric, towels, beads, and arranging random knick knacks together for a music video for my song “Patchwork Heart”, which is coming out in September on my new record “Jelly-Filled-Medusas”. I also sculpted clay creatures and did stop motion animations with my dear friends, all within the framework of these dollhouses and display.)
When I launched out into Provo Utah about a year ago to begin my adult life journey, I never imagined where I would be and what I am doing now. I was met with a large network of beautiful people actively working on stitching hearts together amid the grief of leaving oppressive, restrictive systems. This community of ex-mormon artists (and truly everyone here, no matter their background or current life status), teaches me everyday about how to reconnect with myself in ways I didn’t realize were real or possible.
I was never given processing tools to sit with myself and grieve, while still being fully compassionate and connective with the human family around me. I never knew growing up that I don’t need to repress my expression, and I don’t need to “put my shoulder to the wheel, press along, and be in the world but not of the world” in order to be accepted and loved. It’s okay for me to go to the center of the Provo river, to Family Heart Evening at the Heart House, to Garden Ensemble, connect with my family and friends, and be held. I can sit there and sob. Instead of a shameful, embarrassing action I should hide, it’s seen as a beautiful expression.
This dollhouse I believe, although I didn’t realize it at the time, is an expression of this experience I’m actively living out. I’m stumbling and hurting myself and others, but I’m also coming to a deeper love of myself and others. I am coming to realize that that means I’m doing it right, and that truly, there is no right or wrong way to do this human thing. I made this dollhouse as a chaotic refuge for myself, and maybe it can be a refuge for you too.
