Ann Resnick's Wichita Trifecta | Jefferson Godard, Curator at Salina Art Center

Photo by Dimitris Skliris courtesy of the Ulrich Museum of Art

From a trinity of solo exhibitions at the Ulrich Museum, Fisch Haus, and Steckline Gallery, the Wichita art community is celebrating the forty year career of artist Ann Resnick. Trained as a printmaker, Ann is a conceptually-based artist, cultural advocate, and former gallerist. She also has a focus on chronicling those we have lost. More specifically, her work commemorates and honors the lives of others. 

Chapter & Verse, curated by Ksenya Gurstein at the Ulrich Museum of Art focuses on larger serialized works spanning from 1992 - 2021. A series of plastic floral bouquets entitled Offering (2005), radiates on the wall upon entering the exhibition. Organized in a mesmerizing circular pattern, the flower groupings range from a single flower to collections of twenty. While vibrant and celebratory, Offering points to processional themes of remembrance and grief. 

In the daunting thirty-six foot long work, Our Town (2014-16) Resnick laboriously colors obituary pages from The Wichita Eagle, only to then burn them, leaving leaf, stem, and tendril shaped remnants behind. By coloring over and burning the names and details from these lists, we are left to create our own narrative. Through these gestures, the artist allows for us to collectively remember a community of lost individuals and share the mourning that is referenced within these pages. 

The act of burning also serves to memorialize, but points to themes of fragmentation which are prevalent in her work. We're So Sorry (2019) a twenty-six paneled work on paper, each depicting the single handwritten word “sorry,” was drawn from condolences to the artist following the sudden loss of her husband. By isolating this single remorseful word, Resnick employs fragmentation as a means for reflection. The artist then bestows this gift to the viewer, allowing us to have a reflective moment and insert our own memories back into the work. This reciprocal exchange highlights the humanity in her work. While these pieces speak to those who have left us, the vibrant works point towards the vitality of what and who we remember. This celebration also marks being present and assists in allowing us to lament on our own history. 

Throughout Chapter & Verse we bear witness to Resnick’s ability to create works which range from the luscious to the flat as well as the symbolic to the sublime. Often steeped in memory, Resnick does focus her lens on the here and now. In The Pessimist’s Index (2015) the artist invited collaborators to help create a work, given the task of coloring the front page of their respective local newspapers charting varying degrees of optimism and/or pessimism. This resultant sixty-seven page artwork depicts orange as “Optimistic” and black as “Most Pessimistic” and helps to blur our understanding of current events beyond fact vs. opinion.

Photos by Dimitris Skliris courtesy of the Ulrich Museum of Art

Finally, Resnick introduces the viewer to her six siblings in both forty-nine paneled works Jeannesplice and Jeannetic Mutation (both 1992). In Jeannesplice, while abstracted and rendered in heavy woodcut grains, we can still make out traces of facial characteristics. Shared physical aspects like lips, hair, eyes, and even a furrowed brow can be identified in the multi-paneled Jeannesplice. Conversely, in Jeannetic Mutation, Ben Day dots obscure any easily detectable connections yet are arranged in colors suggesting a chronologically. Here, Resnick makes autobiographical gestures through the language of printmaking.  

Photo by Jefferson Godard

Her second solo show, in the Steckline Gallery at Newmark University, phosphorescent colored paper Zinnia flowers fill the wall and pool on the floor of the dimly-lit gallery in So Long, Farewell. This installation, entitled Adieu (2008) features 365 cut out flowers made from woodcut prints. Resnick laments on Adieu, “Loss is inevitable…and taking note of our collective and individual loss is equally inevitable,” as well as her desire to “recognize that the loss of individuals, whether they’re known to us or not, is a shared loss.” 

 

The scale of the flowers is exaggerated, allowing them to reference bodies in this darkened space. Mechanical fans are tucked above in the ceiling frame which help to create both white noise and generate subtle movement in these paper effigies. Resnick says that the flowers are “recursive and revisiting,” and even references a toxicity that these glow-in-the-dark colors suggest. Yet, much like the flowers, we are uplifted by this experience. 

Wichita’s final tribute to Resnick can be witnessed at Fisch Haus. The earliest works from these three shows, Squeeze, Pinch, Smoke: Prints & Drawings 1986-1992 is a series of more gestural drawings, paintings, linocuts, and woodcuts exploring the performative body. We are also introduced here to her husband Kevin Mullins, who left our material world in 2018. Day Smoker/Night Smoker, a painting from 1987, depicts the couple intertwined in the languid ritual act of cigarette smoking. Semicircular lines that mimic clouds of smoke rendered in muted pastel tones swirl around the couple as they look passively beyond the picture plane, while seemingly analyzing something in the distance. The couple's stoic stares are mimicked by their listless gestures, sluggish stances, and hallowed faces.   

Photo by Jefferson Godard

A black and white drawing from this series entitled Smoker (1987) depicts Mullins holding a cigarette betwixt his fingers while his hands attempt to cover up his face. Peeking just out from between his hands, we are confronted with a gaze filled with a mixture of pensiveness and amazement. Another series, Squeeze (1990), comprised of three large woodcut prints featuring two bodies wrapped in a forceful and quasi-amorous embrace. Resnick crops these works to reinforce the implied movement and adds heavily-ingrained woodcuts which gives even more gravitas to these works. 

Throughout these three exhibitions we see the deft hand of an artist who is entrenched in fostering a greater sense of humanity while keeping us cognizant of our own mortality. Although Ann Resnick may be chronicling loss and marking grief in her artworks, she is also giving us hope. Grief, after all, is extremely personal and cannot always be universally shared or understood. Yet, through processing Resnick’s thoughtful works and installations, we can collectively share the memory of others and possibly better understand our own community.