Tremble Like a Flower

Johansson Projects presents Annie Duncan’s first solo exhibition, “Tremble Like a Flower,” on view from January 5 to February 17, 2024 with an artist reception on Friday, January 5, 5-8pm. 

“…San Francisco-based ceramicist and painter Annie Duncan has explored the expanded symbolism of consumer objects and how they frame femininity as slippery or malleable yet something that has historically formed (or at least informed) a person’s relationship with the world. Duncan uses the still life genre to evoke women’s agency in producing their self-image. Considered a “lower” form of art than portraiture or history painting, still life painting was historically one of the only painting genres in which women could seriously participate. By macerating a historical painting genre with the aesthetics of consumer-identity capitalism, Duncan insists that the history of women’s relationship to things must be studied, as modern capitalism attempts to sell us back our identities in pretty prim packages…Women fabricate still lives and sitter identities every day: on the internet, in our rooms. The imagined or fictionalized aspect of this ritual—creating a version of the self we want to project to the outside using objects alone—is, ironically, a type of agency. And desire?” – Katherine Jemima Hamilton

In her recent work, Duncan playfully interweaves painting and sculpture. Whether through deftly executed still-life paintings or oversized hand-worked ceramics, Duncan expresses a deep fondness for objects and the stories they tell. The artist often chooses desk and dresser top melange as her subjects, including empty thread spools, scissors, and flowers in glass vases. Others are more distinctly feminine: disposable pink razors, jaw hair clips, cosmetics, and jewelry, conch shells, curvaceous goddess sculptures, and IUDs.  

 Duncan’s paintings are remarkably complex, recalling the work of 17th-Century Dutch and 18th-Century French still life painters, art history’s original masters of interior views laced with symbolism and illusion. But Duncan’s work presents a bit of a double-entendre in that her interest in illusion is not merely pictorial. Her subjects evoke the trappings and maintenance of feminine beauty. As tools of grooming and adornment, they also assist in maintaining illusions of self.  

 Among her recent sculptures, Duncan presents a vast array of ceramic perfume and ink bottles. Just as these objects anthropomorphize in her paintings, they stand proudly in the round, monumentalized by Duncan’s careful scaling and soft modeling of form. Working in either medium, she remains keenly attentive to light, expertly employing transparency, opacity, and reflection across subjects. Her work is also rich in color, pattern, and dynamic framing. Although we commonly see these items splayed across messy vanities and dressers, Duncan transforms them in her work. Precisely posed and described with great care, here, they embody tension and personality, calling into question our competing desires to possess and behold.

Tremble Like a Flower runs from January 5 – February 17, 2024 with an artist reception on Friday, January, 5-8pm. Johansson Projects is open to the public Thur – Sat 1-5pm.

Disposable razors, oversize IUDs: Annie Duncan plumbs intimacy of everyday objects | January 3, 2024 by Mary Corbin
“With both paint and clay, artist Annie Duncan evokes nostalgia in everyday feminine objects. A tube of lipstick, a hair clip, a perfume bottle, all stir up emotion within the context of the familiar and the symbolic in our lives. With humor and poignancy, Duncan plumbs how these intimate objects, often way oversized in scale, can conjure a particular joyful—or heartbreaking—moment.” LINK

ARTNews: The Best Booths at Untitled Art Miami Beach, From Potato Sculptures to Ominous Razors | December 6, 2023 by Maximilíano Durón  “…At first glance [Annie Duncan’s] works are playful—intentionally so. But they also reflect the artist’s own anxieties about the societal pressures that women often face: rendered at an ominously large scale, the sculptures turn small objects associated with femininity and beauty nightmarishly big…”  LINK

Nothing Without Desire: Annie Duncan’s Objects Can’t Live Without You | July 13, 2023 by Katherine Jemima Hamilton
“By macerating a historical painting genre with the aesthetics of consumer-identity capitalism, Duncan insists that the history of women’s relationship to things must be studied, as modern capitalism attempts to sell us back our identities in pretty prim packages.” LINK

Annie Duncan (b. 1997, San Francisco, California) makes paintings and ceramic sculptures that explore femininity, symbolism, and art historical references. Leaning into her affinity for collecting, sorting, and obsessing over objects, her work finds humor, heartbreak, joy, and meaning in the jumbled world we inhabit. She received a BA from Vassar College in 2019 and an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2023. Annie was a featured artist with Plunge Towels. She has shown her work at Saint Joseph’s Art Society (San Francisco), Good Mother Gallery (Los Angeles) and Johansson Projects (Oakland), among others. 

CV

Annie Duncan makes large-scale still lifes—both in the form of acrylic paintings and ceramic sculptures. Working directly from life, she creates alluring compositions that evoke the pile on top of a dresser, the emptied contents of a purse, or the chaos on the floor of a bedroom. In these saturated and distorted works, she explores the power of objects as symbols and storytelling devices. In traditional still life painting, elements like flowers or shells are used as allusions to the female body. She explores these symbols and pairs them with more contemporary references—objects like a plastic razor, an IUD, accessories, or beauty products—that encapsulate aspirational ideals of gender, femininity, and sexuality. In scaling up the objects, she emphasizes their cultural and personal significance, reframing their historical value.