Have you ever entered a space and felt transported? It might have been a landscape, it could have been a building. It made an impression on you, a bodily impression, a sensory impression. You take a photograph, hoping to capture that sensation. But later, when you look at it, it’s not quite right. Everything is flat. Things aren’t where you experienced them, how you experienced them, or where you still feel them to be, in the memory held in your mind and body.

Ana Young isn’t interested in pictorially representing scenes. Her paintings channel the moment of entering a space, the moment of slowing down and settling into stillness and silence, where awareness of light, volume, and spatial relationships grow. Allowing the gaze to settle into Young’s tonal works, the dense clusters of marks begin to reveal spaces between the layers. Shapes advance and recede, drawing the viewer further into the painting’s depths. The canvas expands and contracts, breathing with us despite existing within the finite confines of a stretcher.

Read Chloe Wolifson’s essay about Ana’s work here.

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