ANNA WEYANT

The paintings on view in Paris build on the motif of the dollhouse that Weyant has been exploringsince her earliest work. In preparing The Guitar Man, she constructed a new, exquisite physicalexample reminiscent of the iconic Bates family house from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). The artistmined this structure for inspiration—House Exterior (2023) depicts it head-on—and used it as a platformfor experimentation with lighting design. The jewel-box scale of the gallery space at rue de Castiglionealso resonates with the dollhouse’s claustrophobic aura, evoking the kinds of childhood memories thatlinger into adulthood.

The eerie, portentous air of the dollhouse form permeates all of Weyant’s works, whether portraits,figures, or still-life compositions, resonating with images that undercut their subjects’ attempts atcomposure with moments of conscious awkwardness, hinting at mild but pervasive anxiety and themanipulative influence of unseen—perhaps, here, directorial—hands. Weyant’s subjects reject theimpulse to violent reaction, however, in favor of quiet, introspective refusal. In her precisely renderedstill lifes, meanwhile, she lends everyday objects an unsettling air.

In Girl with Candlestick (2023), Weyant depicts a pale blond figure—the exhibition’s protagonists havebeen made to appear interchangeable—wrapped in a white sheet toting a slender candle in a brassholder through a pitch-dark interior. The subject’s characteristically smooth, rounded face and upward-cast eyes are given eerie new shape and expression by the illumination from below, a trick borrowedfrom cinematic and theatrical lighting that recasts the ordinary as malevolent or mysterious.

In This Is a Life? (2023), she causes the image of a silver vase of flowers perched on a woodenwindowsill that frames an opaque black backdrop—and in which her own reflection is visible—toappear doubly artificial. The work’s white-and-yellow blooms are flat and stylized, as if cut from sheetsof paper, while the title’s ambiguously provocative question is splashed across the upper third of thecomposition in a bold red-and-white script. The query is the title of a 1955 Looney Tunes animation thatparodies the 1950s–‘60s American talk show This Is Your Life, but might be read as casting mischievousdoubt on the value of the still-life genre, or on the flowers’ (or our) own existence.