Annabeth Marks at Parker Gallery

Annabeth Marks, Slipper (2024). Acrylic on canvas, 41 × 17.5 × 2 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Parker Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson.

The crosshatched and woven canvases in Continuous Time, Annabeth Marks’ first solo show at Parker Gallery, were either intensely monochromatic or utilized only a handful of hues, as carefully selected as musical notes. Color can arouse an instinctual psychological response, which Marks seeks to channel into an active emotional encounter with her work. As the artist has noted, “[Color] is the matter that moves between forms and projects out towards the viewer…I am interested in the gut level emotional currency that highly saturated color provokes.”¹ By turns melancholy, seductive, threatening, and peaceful, the high chroma paintings in Continuous Time employed intricate layering techniques and deft manipulations of color to explore our matrix of perception, reflection, and cultural mediation.

Marks’ sculptural paintings often extend beyond the typical parameters of stretcher and frame into something more uncanny. In Slipper (2024), six strips of canvas hang past the bottom edge of the frame in alternating lengths and thicknesses, ranging from about half an inch to an inch and a half. They conjure unwound gauze bandages, limp stirrups, a garter belt with the stockings unclipped —some array of slackened bodily constraints that hovers between the medical and the erotic. Slipper is almost entirely coated in an unctuous layer of pink that recalls bubblegum-flavored cough syrup or an inflamed throat (rather than the satin ballet slippers the title might connote). Girlishness, for some, is a contagious phenomenon with the capacity to absorb the living body: a 2023 survey found that nearly one-third of adult men would be “uncomfortable” wearing pink.² In Slipper, likewise, girlhood breathes from the drenched pink canvas like a virus. The only exception is a stark, haphazardly smeared red rectangle in the middle. To call it vaginal doesn’t cover it—Marks’ crimson rectangle is a wound, the kind that needs years of medical management. Beneath it, two mirrored strips of canvas arch and twist like ribbons, before again falling beneath Slipper’s viscous pink surface. Slipper seduces and disgusts, its red rectangle as crude as the blood at the center of biologically-prescribed femininity. Marks’ exploration of this highly charged color evokes gender as a constraint as much as an expression.

Many of the works in Continuous Time feature a central panel that, like in Slipper, is accented by several looping, lace-like tentacles of canvas interwoven around a structural frame. The patterns change in density and intricacy in each piece, lending a different affective structure to each experiment with color. In Silver Spirit (2024), the crossed central section is composed of a gleaming, sinuous mass of plaited, twisted, and layered canvas strips. Like Walt Whitman’s “noiseless patient spider” who spins “filament, filament, filament, out of itself / Ever unreeling,”³ Marks’ weaving conjures the intangible layers that comprise each of our subjective worlds. Emanating a cool yet brilliant shine, Silver Spirit recalls the meditative minimalist paintings of Mary Corse or Agnes Martin’s tranquil grids. As with Corse and Martin, Marks’ repetitions gesture towards metaphysical vastness. While from a distance, Silver Spirit looks completely symmetrical, its lattice is imperfect; minor imbalances and awkward corners reveal themselves up close. While Slipper externalizes how femininity is imposed, projected on, and assumed by the body, Silver Spirit explores the mysterious, sometimes warped integrations of our internal psychic apparatus.

Inevitably, Marks’ exploration of perception reflects the layered associations that inform both our sense of identity and how we perceive the external world. Color forms a path not just between the work and the viewer, but between the viewer and themselves, proving itself discernable only through a multitude of personal and cultural affinities. Reflector (2023), which hung beside Silver Spirit, proffers a structure for the obscure triadic relationship highlighted in Continuous Time between what we see and what we perceive, what we perceive and what we remember. Combining earth-toned greens and browns with strips and squares of different blue shades, Reflector holds the sky in its web. There’s the blazing blue of high noon, the dusky blue right after the sun falls, the deep navy of a night sky. Each shade summons the colors of a day cresting and falling away, recalling time itself. Marks weaves these hues into a domestic shape. The central panels are a gentle, inviting mustard, as though we’re looking at a lighted window. The passing days, in all their different blues, form a “house” in Reflector —the house in which our lives take place. From here we can’t see the exact shape of what’s within, but we can feel the glow.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 37.

Natasha Boyd is a writer from Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in The Nation, The Drift, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Pioneerworks, and elsewhere. You can read more of her writing at natashakboyd.com.

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