Anna Fusco
Man of my word

November 6 to December 5, 2021

Ampersand is pleased to present Man of my word, an exhibition of new drawings by Anna Fusco. “These drawings were made in my bedroom,” she notes, “which has doubled as my studio, overlooking the Atlantic ocean on the Rockaway Peninsula. There is something in Rockaway that is familiar, caring, messy, confused, stunted, free, late, but ultimately unknowable based on its proximity to one of the most populated cities in the world.” Her drawings seem imbued by the essence of this place. Overtly with imagery of women surfers—it was in Rockaway that she first started surfing. But also in the words she uses to describe it and her manner of living there, that unknowable but free quality that underscores the colorful ambiguity of her recent work. She reflects on a summer of drawing, surfing and a daily meditation practice—a desire to be grounded in the present moment, avoiding the mental anguish that can stem from something remembered or something anticipated. “But I don’t feel like my drawings are grounded in the present at all. That doesn’t always come naturally to me. Fantasy and narrative, story-thinking, come very naturally to me. My drawings are just a projection of me, my attempt to fuse together bits of my past and whatever I can't stop fantasizing about on the horizon.” She also notes that the drawings were made in anticipation of a nomadic cross-country drive, her fourth in recent years. The excitement of seeing the mountains and desert again, of finding somewhere else to live while confronting the unease of a fragmented lifestyle. The drawings are thus, it seems, an amalgamation of personal diary mixed with the conjurings of a shifting narrator—still frames in an imaginary American West set in the soft textures of her preferred medium, color pencil. “I don't like working with messy, globby, wet things,” she says. “I get a lot of satisfaction from the rich pigments and flatness the pencils give. I love to write by hand—journaling informs my work—and the color pencils never feel far away from that possibility. The pencil serves a casual function of spontaneity most brilliantly. At any moment I can stop scribbling and start writing.”

"I want everybody to live very close. I want to borrow from each other, want to bike over in house shoes for a quick game of cards on the deck floor with some tea or digestif. I want animals around and wind chimes above our heads. Somebody is cooking, I brought the bread, players come and go, a candle is lit to keep off the bugs. Dogs need to be fed, "turn the record over." It plays through the screen windows and so too comes chatter from inside the kitchen. They come back from surfing and pull out a bag of oysters from the backseat of the car. There is little distinction between mine and yours, where we are sleeping tonight, and under whose roof matters not much. If we separate, we are sure to see each other again on the waves under the morning mist. If we stay together, on the couches, on the floor, dozed into deep listening and burning midnight oil, then one of us will rise and cut some fruit, make some coffee and tea, but not the same person who did it last time because in this house we take turns. In this house we dance."

Anna Fusco (b. 1989, Rome, Italy) lives and works between the Rockaway Peninsula in New York, California and Mexico. She received her BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York in 2019. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions, including barn’s burnt down, now I can see the moon at Tourist in White River Junction, Vermont. Man of my word is her first exhibition at Ampersand.

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