Anna Weyant
b. 1995, Canada
The hapless subjects of Anna Weyant’s indelible paintings and drawings are recurrently tested by everyday circumstances, weathering what the artist has described as “low-stakes trauma.” In these precisely rendered scenes, figures—most often young and female—find themselves embroiled in tragicomic narratives with an ironic twinge, offering a dreamlike insight into the capacity of popular culture and social convention to manufacture and distort gestures, rituals, and signifiers of femininity. But far from presenting her protagonists as merely symbolic, Weyant remains sensitive to their human idiosyncrasies and contradictions, picturing characters who are endearing, mysterious, and wholly themselves. In her crystalline still-life compositions, meanwhile, everyday objects adopt an uncanny, portentous air.
Weyant was born in Calgary, Canada, in 1995. After earning a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, she relocated to New York, then studied painting at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. Moving back to New York, she worked as a studio assistant while pursuing her own practice. Among her first exhibited works is a sequence of darkly cinematic canvases depicting a dollhouse—modeled after one that she owned as a child—and its young female inhabitants. A later series deconstructs the appearance of American suburbia in Lifetime’s made-for-television movies, casting it as a surreal realm in which violence and disaster lurk just beneath the surface. In her still lifes, Weyant depicts fruit, flowers, and other items in a similarly unsettling light; Lily (2021), for example, juxtaposes the titular bloom with a revolver bound in gold ribbon.
In these and other works, Weyant employs a somber, muted palette of deep greens, dusty pinks, and deep black. She also draws on art historical and present-day influences, from seventeenth-century Dutch masters such as Frans Hals and Judith Leyster to twentieth-century mavericks like Balthus to contemporary painters Jennifer Packer and Ellen Berkenblit. As revealed in her contributions to group exhibitions including and I will wear you in my heart of heart at FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2021); Artists Inspired by Music: Interscope Reimagined at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2022); and Women of Now: Dialogues of Memory, Place & Identity at the Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas (2022), Weyant displays a deep understanding and appreciation of her work’s roots and parallels while eliciting an immediate and emotional response.