In the late sixties, multimedia artist Bruce Nauman promoted a definition of art that included the activity of the artist in his studio, which he valued more than any resulting product. And yet forty years later, artists’ studios remain remote from the final works displayed in galleries and museums. This October, we have the rare opportunity to view artworks in their original context: The Weather Outside, an exhibition of Ann Worthing’s paintings curated by her long-time dealer Aron Packer, is on view at the artist’s Ravenswood studio.

The earliest works included are from Worthing’s 2006 series, Post, which began with the discovery of 30-year-old letters from friends, family, and ex-lovers in her damp basement. After affixing each letter to a custom-sized wood panel, the varied patterns of handwriting guided explorations of form and color. In some works, lines of text form the skeleton of delicate grids and boxes. In others, the curve of the script is echoed in organic shapes and arabesques. Language dissolves into the abstract—that to which we cannot assign a name. A feeling of intimacy is tempered by illegibility, hinting at the ultimate mystery of even our closest companions.

In a new series, The Missing Hours, Worthing continues to use collage as a basis for small-scale abstraction. Sumi-e paintings on gauzy rice paper crinkle and shimmer against wooden supports. The simple black strokes hint at language without forming explicit characters. Trapezoids frame empty space and color is almost entirely drained from the surface. The hum of obscured words that emanates from Post is replaced here
with silence.

Paintings based on the view outside of the artist’s window capture a similar quiet beauty and bleakness. The formless
haze of open sky breaks against the rigid grid of a neighboring building. The even rhythm of bricks evokes the drone of white noise. The absence of human figures allows the viewer
to experience the scene directly as its sole protagonist.
Light, pattern, and implied sounds captivate before words
come to mind.

A final body of work features animals emerging from organic swirls of paint on canvas. Overwhelming lushness proves just as ineffable as the spareness of Worthing’s other paintings. The quasi-vegetative chaos in which her animals reside materializes a fear of the unknown and un-nameable. We face Worthing’s lemurs and turtles as creatures whose inner lives we can
never access.

Worthing insists that style must be content driven, an ethos that allows her to shift seamlessly between minimalism and expressionism as she articulates the limits of language and the momentary experience of absurdity in the familiar.