Dan Adler on Annabeth Marks
As arguments for analog expertise, Annabeth Marks’s summary photos are completely convincing. Meticulously made with hand-mixed pigments and a devotion to element, every is an intricate investigation of coloration and sample. Typically immune to photographic documentation, they bear many indicators of a labor-intensive wrestle to find that good compositional cocktail. Whereas rooted in modernist soil, Marks’s collage-based aesthetic eschews fairly historic pastiche for one thing stranger, richer. She affords retailers for sluggish hypothesis, avoiding our tradition of accelerated time that’s more and more missing in substance and civilization.
A variety of objects on view at Franz Kaka mirrored a number of distinct processes. Take Talisman (all works 2021), comprising a stretched canvas rendered in mauve that serves as a floor upon which severed canvas strips of varied lengths and widths are positioned vertically and horizontally, leading to a semi-symmetrical construction of yellow, orange, and inexperienced framing a central pink panel. These particular person lengths of canvas have been subjected to elaborate and repetitive rituals of folding, looping, layering, creasing, hanging, portray, and repainting. Marks undoes the inflexible and rationalized grid, making a extra sensual and eccentric house. Shielding, a piece from the identical group, encompasses a stretched help coated completely in lemon, with comparable vibrant networks of adhered linear bands. On the periphery of the image, some strips dangle under or protrude into house, whereas others wrap across the work’s edges, as if the portray is attempting to guard itself. Certainly, Marks clads her compositions incrementally and in a seemingly measured, ritualistic vogue—maybe to make sure the invocation of a better energy. Whereas her undertaking has a comparatively sculptural slant, Marks’s brightly hued grids recall Mary Heilmann’s early-Seventies works that check with weavings and textiles, which can be learn equally, by way of a gender-based critique of hard-edged, primary-color abstraction.
Rendered in a hanging, artificial blue, Every Day Is a Entire Yr is much more detailed by way of its latticelike layering: Thick and skinny strands of canvas are coated in order that they appear akin to easy and supple leather-based. Whereas the monochrome recollects the each day, multicoating routine of On Kawara’s date work, 1966–2013, it affords a degree of intricacy and intimacy that units it other than the comparatively reductivist languages of Minimalism. Bordered by a sequence of canvas loops—their presence implying that the image might be suspended like a banner—Marks’s works have a playfully fetishistic and erotic high quality related to recurring actions of bending and protruding, fastening and tying. As such, they’re harking back to Eva Hesse’s mid-Nineteen Sixties painted reliefs, which stray from the chilly seriousness of items by her (principally male) Minimalist colleagues.
Two works from one other group, All Alongside Right here and Refrain, disfigure the grid even additional. In these items, Marks is much more express about utilizing scraps—right here registering as residues, runoffs, or remnants—which might be roughly lower and positioned at diversified angles with a spread of textures, colours, contours, and thicknesses of matière. Rougher edges, akin to these of cardboard, usually reveal the weave beneath slapdash washes of pigment. Coming throughout as extra precarious, these photos, which bring to mind board video games, nonetheless keep a way of containment and management. Seen as a gaggle, Marks’s work might encourage the beholder to contemplate “enjoying” a model of themselves on their very own phrases. What number of protecting layers do we’d like? What number of colours and textures, and wherein combos, are obligatory? Which elements now require a contemporary coat or a minute adjustment? Marks’s painted discourse dwells inside a site the place the enjoyment and urgency of invention and reinvention are avowed.
— Dan Adler
