Anna Wehrwein: "Tender Ground"
Pentimenti Art Gallery
145 N 2nd St.
Philadelphia
Jan. 21, 2024
Tea strainers; quilts; notepads; novelty socks; potted plants — these are common “starter pack” ingredients to the cozy lifestyles we’ve all been sold since roughly 2015.
In Anna Wehrwein’s art exhibit, “Tender Ground,” those objects are mundane motifs adorning a deeper examination into our modern search for comfort.
Wehrwein’s array of paintings and multi-media drawings on display inside Pentimenti Art Gallery show human subjects visually integrated into habitats built to protect and represent their person: Bedrooms, porches, gardens. The domestic scenes visualize the boundaries that exist between ourselves and both the natural and constructed worlds that exist around us.
Over the last decade, maybe since Trump’s first run for the presidency, there’s been a broadening obsession with romanticizing our interior worlds through the uncomplicated lens of “coziness.” As the psychological glue of America began to peel away from the walls and families ripped themselves apart over a new patriarchal symbol poised to enter The White House, global conceptions of cozy went viral: The Danish idea of “hygge” got big, South Korean consumer culture around cutesy stationary and stuffed animals continued to grow, Tumblr invented Cottage Core, and cozy tech (think games like “Stardew Valley”) became a cornerstone of Artificial Intelligence. All of these phenomenon involve either idealizing the beauty of the natural world or fetishizing the artificiality of extracting ourselves from it.
Each image in the show captures a human subject caught up in their own inner reality. The artist’s eye represents the intimacy of witnessing someone wrapped in reflection without posing disruption as an onlooker. The works read as odes to ordinary moments: napping; journaling; sitting at the kitchen table; reading; watering plants.
These modest actions are swathed in the celebratory colors of a passing day. The yellow of a blasé summer afternoon describes the glory of lounging in a daybed. The burning orange of a hot sunset delivers the indulgent energy of sitting down to read a good book. The concrete blue of a clear noon deposits hope on the dashboard of a common car ride. The Who song “Blue, Red and Grey” comes to mind.
"Tu eres un sol," is written in the frames of certain images. In Wehrwein's world, people are the changing light.
The art is clearly a product of the times: Polka dot tee-shirts, Tevas, and cuffed jeans resurrect a hipster sensibility, one that harkens back to the subculture’s sense of soft core outsider-dom. But the most important element of this aesthetic is the pacifist devotion to plant life. Indoors, Wehrwein's subjects are shrouded in floral sheets or surrounded by hanging plants and potted palms; in other paintings, people look out at gardens, towering evergreens, or ponds fenced by cattails.
There’s a balance struck in the impressionistic haze of Wehrwein’s brushstrokes between the shield of our highly curated daily lives and the relentless instability of passing time.
The crazier shit gets outside, the more we seem to strain towards internal utopia. But inner perfection is inherently impossible; people are infinitely more complicated than the commodities they collect. Wehrwein’s artworks, while illustrating the beauty in the banal, also hit on the blurry bounty of boundaries we’re forced to face no matter where we shelter or stand.
The unifying elements in Wehrwein’s paintings are not the familiar fixings a certain sector of the population has come to equate with home. Rather, I see the persistence of boundaries as the shifting and universal barriers that the artist suggests we must all forever build and dismantle. At the end of the day, we individually govern our own thoughts, our decision-making, our relationships with other people, our own sphere of existence.
Wehrwein watches as people close to her engage with their own immediate environments from squares of safety. A man stares out to the lake from the confines of a wooden porch; a reader in a rocking chair is cocooned within closed shades; a person carrying a plant in their lap is contained by their car’s plexiglass; even a couple sat in a scenic park huddle within the exact container of their ground blanket.
As we collage our homes with cozy, maybe we’re really just hunting for a sustained taste of tenderness — or a sense of security that is and will never be promised.
