ANN WEATHERSBY – THERE IS A CODE OF BEHAVIOR SHE KNEW
2019-12-16In Ann Weathersby’s work, the page reflects and the glass absorbs. Books close and harden, like sewn-up wounds. Pulp fossilized. Stripped of language, the women on their covers float, putting down their meanings with a sigh, as one would a bag or a baby. Arched backs, open mouths, closed eyes. Found photographs are pressed into flat translucent weights. You could fill your pockets with these palm-sized memories, or throw them with ease, watch them shatter. Some of the women in the room we know, some are nameless. But they are all familiar, known in a quiet stomach sense, similar to how you could still find the home of your middle school best friend with no address. She moved towns away, decades ago, but you half expect to see her face in the window.
Weathersby mixes the colors in her painterly glass sculptures, pressing kinetic hues into stillness. No wonder this is how people used to evoke divine presence: a pool of pink light stains the empty floor. Here, shadows fall golden. Lilac glows. Without the tangle of girls and history intruding, it could be a room of minimalist sculpture, pure form, boy heaven. But instead, they lean on the shelf together, milky obelisks and reclining limbs. Both seem precarious and ancient. Wooden boxes open to reveal a different kind of precious relic: Judy Blume, Go Ask Alice, found self-portraits, angled and curious. Blume enters another pantheon of women writers, (Woolf, Duras, Lessing, etc.), worshipped by way of citation. Weathersby creates a palimpsest, sanding down the ink on familiar texts so that the words gently lift from the page, and then printing her own surreal narratives in their place.
Exhibition runs through to January 19th, 2020
Fortnight Institute
60 East 4th St.
NYC 10003
