STILL LIFE WITH TIME: ANN RESNICK AT THE ULRICH MUSEUM OF ART By Emily Christensen
Chapter & Verse—an exhibition of works by Ann Resnick
the passage of another few minutes. In applying heat
at Wichita State’s Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita—was
to paper, she generates ash, performing small-scale
a quietly deceptive show. Through lengthy, mostly paper-
cremations. Cenotaph (Mixed) (2016) and Spring (2015)
based processes, Resnick addresses grief, mortality, and
demonstrate the aesthetic range Resnick achieves through
the incongruity of family ties. The artist’s conceptual
burning paper.
strength and cohesive vision were immediately obvious in the exhibition’s selection. But once I invested time into Chapter & Verse, it unfolded in surprising ways.
(2011), the artist recreated scraps of handwritten correspondence in acrylic/spray paint and India ink,
The museum dedicated its largest gallery to the exhibition
respectively. The viewer doesn’t need to know the
of 16 works, many serialized and some installed floor-to-
backstory to understand why Resnick may have labored
ceiling. An abundance of white space and discreet use of
over 26 oversized permutations of the word “sorry.” I
title cards gave each large polyptych enough room to fully
imagined how she must have considered its meaning
command the viewer’s attention. Conversely, a glance across
and how it connects to each person who committed the
the gallery conveyed the orderly graphic quality of Resnick’s
word to paper in their own distinctive handwriting. Both
overall practice. Though a wide breadth of her work was
We’re So Sorry and Dear Ann, Love exemplify how Resnick
represented, the most compelling were pieces she created by
both offers and obscures meaning in a way that makes
coloring or spray painting paper before laboriously burning
her work accessible and universal.
it into dramatic webs. The largest of these was Our Town (2014–16), composed of a series of newspaper obituary pages concealed by colored pencils in Sunday-comics hues and burned into a complex and delicate pattern recalling lacework. Each piece like it demands the viewer’s physical presence; photographs dilute the mesmerizing nature of their texture, detail, and repetition.
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For both We’re So Sorry (2019) and Dear Ann, Love
Four works explicitly reference the grainy details of genetic relationships, including the print series Jeannesplice and Jeannetic Mutation (1992). These gave Chapter & Verse human context for Resnick’s investigations into time, language, and the broad cultural landscape in which she finds herself. Pessimist’s Index (2015) nods to all three and also represents Resnick’s occasional collaborations. The
Our Town is 36 feet in length and stretched across
installation was composed of 67 front pages of 2015-
the corner of two gallery walls. In contrast, 115:17:13
era Sunday newspapers. Resnick and 15 collaborators
(2018) uses much thicker stock to make an austere and
painted or papered over the text, color coding each article
less obvious statement. Still, the technique carries its
according to the relative optimistic or pessimistic nature
own meaning: each space the artist creates represents
of its content.
REGIONAL REVIEW