SARAH ANN WEBER

In I Know Her, Sarah Ann Weber evokes a vibrant realm of unruly flux: day and night, abundance and restraint, interior and exterior. The exhibition traces recent seismic shifts in Weber’s own life, significantly the birth of her daughter and a cross-country move back to her hometown of Chicago after a decade spent in Los Angeles. She entwines autobiography and gestural botanicals in sensory terrains, while adding to the canon of images of mother and child.

Weber began the works in southern California, drawing inspiration from the landscape’s tangle of entropy and perpetual renewal. Following her relocation, she reacquainted herself with the Midwest’s strong seasonal cycles of winter dormancy followed by spring growth, discovering new compositional rhythms of space, density, and light. Landscape functions within these works as setting and psychology. The shift from California’s perpetual fecundity to the prairie’s measured temporality and stark flatness gives rise to new spatial logic. Each painting then is a record of adaptation, indexes of weather, labor, vegetation, and time.

Extending these themes into the gallery Weber created an installation from piles of dried flowers scattered about the floor. Fragrant debris of red rose petals, creamy jasmine blooms, and yellow calendula evoke the changing seasons and echo the rhythms of domestic gestures of tending, raking, and renewal. As visitors move through the space, their footsteps may stir the lightweight material causing further scattering. These drifts of once-living flowers mirror their drawn and painted counterparts, further blurring the distinctions between image and residue.

Figures, too, appear and dissolve within fields of abundant growths of flora, thickets of vines, blossoms, and grasses. Their spectral appearances are declarative and searching; we witness a struggle for individuation and for coherence of identity. These fleeting moments of early motherhood—holding, consoling, or running after—evoke the emotional toll of caregiving as the artist’s individuality is fractured by the constant needs and presence of the new child. This tension is mirrored in Weber’s materials; watercolor bleeds and pools in vaporous veils and colored pencil reinscribes boundaries, tethering atmosphere to form. The works pulse between containment and overgrowth, visibility and concealment. This unification of spontaneity and deliberation echoes Weber’s navigation between new motherhood and her studio practice.

Architectural forms—windows and doors—punctuate the compositions as mediating structures, as thresholds between memory and the present, wild nature and the domestic. Recalling the long history of the window in painting as a framing device for light and perspective, Weber’s frame is porous, sometimes holding the composition in place, while other times threatening to dissolve it. Her use of the motif becomes a metaphor for perception and passage; it speaks to her experience of looking and longing: gazing through glass doors and large picture windows onto dormant winter prairies upon arriving in Chicago and subsequently watching them burst alive in spring.

Across I Know Her, Weber locates apertures where the maternal, environmental, and imaginative converge, accumulating dualities that form an ecology of unruliness and resilience. The exhibition’s title gestures to multiple recognitions—the child, the mother, the landscape, the artist herself—each glimpsed, inhabiting a space of flux and perpetual renewal.

Sarah Ann Weber (b. 1988, Chicago, IL) received her MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute, Chicago. Weber has exhibited her work in solo exhibitions at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles; 12.26, Dallas, TX; Club Pro, Los Angeles; The Franklin, Chicago; and a two-person exhibition with Allison Hall at SOCO Gallery, Charlotte, NC. Selected group exhibitions include Stems Gallery, Paris, France; MAUVE Gallery, Vienna, Austria; Greenpoint Terminal Gallery, Brooklyn; Hunter Shaw Fine Art, Los Angeles; Galerie Nord/Kunstverein Tiergarten, Berlin; Locust Projects, Miami; and Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago. Weber’s work was recently included in a group museum exhibition, Outside: In at the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, Jacksonville, FL. In 2023 Weber participated in the Miami-based Fountainhead Artists-in-Residence program. Weber lives and works in Chicago, IL.