Annabeth Marks

Presented by Artist Curated Projects

Over the summer Annabeth and I had a conversation about our struggles with hanging apparatuses, the difficulty of figuring out how to get our respective works on the wall. A couple of months later I was reading an essay in an Eva Hesse monograph that described Hesse’s very similar challenges. She was troubled with the physical and technical aspects of her work, and it filled her with self-doubt. All of her male peers were using fabricators, and eventually, she did as well. I wondered, and the essay did not clarify, what it must have felt like to surrender her invented processes for a process based in received knowledge and standardization.

I wrote Annabeth a postcard about what I was reading, and how it reminded me of our conversation. Several months later, staying in Annabeth’s apartment while she was out of town, I noticed the postcard on her fridge. I had run out of room after two or three sentences, and the rest of the writing was on a folded sheet of paper that I’d taped to the front. I realized my addition had made parts of the original content impossible to read. Without unfolding, the postcard and the entirety of its message would have been unknowable. It was a palimpsest, not unlike the surfaces of Annabeth’s paintings, where she is the first and second scribe.

We Are The Weather’s central forms are banner-like paintings, and they are taller and wider than Annabeth’s body by a lot. They are one continuous piece of canvas–long and rectilinear–stretched on both sides, primed, front/back, front/back, unstretched, cut, collaged, painted and hung, or hung then painted. They are rigid, fallible, and interconnected. They have insides that can be reached into but not seen, and outsides waxy with use, like cauldrons. Annabeth explained to me how she has to drag these pieces across the floor, how heavy they are, how difficult they are to work on, how hard it is to hang them, in the solitude of her studio.

Although there are semi-­pictorial forms in each banner they evade image-ness. They are the landscapes we carry around with us. There is the desert, where Annabeth has spent a lot of time painting, and there is also upstate New York where she painted this summer. But there are also the landscapes of Joan Mitchell, Milton Avery, Munch, and even Bonnard.

There are inherited landscapes, like those of Annabeth’s grandfather Rudolf Staffel, a ceramicist. Annabeth has stories about visiting her grandfather in his studio. Every week he would buy garbage bags of clothing from the Goodwill in order to avoid doing laundry but kept everything he didn’t wear. She describes a scene with mountains of jackets.

Annabeth’s jacket pieces begin with leather trenches from the thrift store. She gessoes them and then applies solid color, fully covering them in paint. Even though I knew the process before I ever saw them in person, once I was in the studio amidst the jacket pieces this transformation was imperceptible; the haptic similarity between the paint and leather is uncanny.

Each coat is made from what was once a container for flesh and blood. Each has embedded in it cultural and class information. Each wears its own age and holds its own time. They are something very specific. Annabeth referred to them as sites to engage the painting. For me they operate as photographs do: they hold the trace of a body. They are place/time information. They are proof.

The more we spoke about the work, the more awash I was in its femininity; the built-in labor, and its invisibility, the particular structure of the details, their muddy enveloping colors. They are feminine; not in a way that protects female as a closed identity, but in a way that acknowledges its ongoing marginality within the material world.

The day after going to Annabeth’s studio I went to see Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019 at the Whitney. I was hypnotized by a 1970 Eva Hesse piece hung up in a corner of the exhibition. No Title is a web of latex-­covered ropes strung about with many points of contact. The wall label prompted viewers to ‘Watch a Video of ‘No Title’ being installed,’ I guess to offer a glimpse into the exertion required to erect its clinging form. The structural similarity between No Title and Annabeth’s jacket pieces wasoverwhelming. An electric current of philogyny ran through me. The next day when I showed iPhone photos to my spouse, trying to explain why I’d felt so transfixed, I started crying. I zoomed in to the image with my two fingers as if a close-­up of all of the precarious points of contact within the sculpture could justify my emotions.

The Empath is a hybrid form, both a jacket and a banner. You can walk all the way around it. It is a living thing and a dead thing. It is a she, and she is terrain and torso. Her harness is a grassy hill cut from the cloth of another jacket. Her yellow is grim. She is hung and splayed. Her silhouette is that of a story-­book mother spreading her skirt wide to protect her children's eyes from some horrible violence. On the backside, we can see that the coat was not made with one continuous piece of hide, but instead with many small swatches, each with their own price tag, perhaps each from a different cow. On one side the chassis is sealed and adorned, on the other, all its sensitive parts are exposed.

Constructed with the rigor of invention, Annabeth’s We Are The Weather, is filled with insistence, vulnerability, fantasy, and the power to manifest. Layers of canvas and leather touch like the petals of an infinitely complicated flower.

- Em Rooney