ANN WEATHERSBY: There is a code of behavior she knew

The first mirror was water, darkened. Small bedroom oceans, kept in bowls. Books came way before reflective glass, but for centuries women were only allowed one. Technically, light has three options: be absorbed, transmitted and transformed, or reflected back. Sounds like love, or knowledge. What is the difference between a pane of glass and a page of text? We look through one and read the other. In 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. Blurring quotation and recollection, the stories remind us everything we have was never wholly ours. This inheritance flutters at the edge of all of our gestures, even, or perhaps especially, at the moments that seem most keenly private. Woolf once compared the role of the woman to that of a looking glass, reflecting "the figure of man at twice its natural size." But in Weathersby's sculptures, mirroring the world around you does not erase your own ability to look, absorb, transmit and transform. Instead, light is a kind of language, read and shared, and language flickers like a candle, susceptible to the smallest breath. I think of those women looking into water and seeing themselves. I would call that writing.  - Text by Audrey Wollen

Fortnight Institute is pleased to present Ann Weathersby's first solo exhibition in New York, consisting of new mixed media works. Ann Weathersby (b. 1970, New Orleans) lives & works in NYC. Exhibitions include Yale University Art Gallery, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac (Paris), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Museo Tamayo (Mexico City), Chicago Cultural Center, Museum of Photographic Arts (San Diego), Anthology Film Archives and Fortnight Institute, NYC. She has been a faculty member of the School of Visual Arts since 2004. Weathersby received a Bachelor of Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin, and an MFA from Yale University.