Ann Worthing was cleaning out her Bucktown basement last year when she found letters she’d received as a grad student here from 1980 through ’82. “They were watermarked and moldy,” she says. “But I thought, ‘I can’t throw these out.’” They were from friends, including some exes, plus her mom, who died in 1999. “My response freaked me out because it was so intense,” Worthing says. “Just the look of the handwriting, not even the content, conjured up different times, places, and people, a constellation of memories. Time folded back on itself–I was still in my studio but also with people 25 years ago.” She began to think about making art using the letters; though she’d always painted representationally, she decided that “any image would be too direct, and too reductive, for how profound these letters felt.” After placing them on panels of birch wood, she covered them with paint and wax. The 43 resulting pieces at Packer Schopf are mysteriously luminous; peering through layers of designs at the mostly obscured letters, you feel you’re looking through veils of memory toward a distant, light-filled presence.
