ANNE LIBBY: Even Odd

Night Gallery is thrilled to present Even Odd, an exhibition of new sculptures by Anne Libby. This marks the artist’s fourth solo show with the gallery, following See Me So (2021), Earthflash (2018) and Marrow into Moxie (2015-6).

Vision is a slippery conjurer. It oozes across surfaces, clinging like a translucent skin to all that enters its line of sight. It spills over, leaks out, seeps beyond the body’s confines, and stretches hungrily outward. Turn inward and the strangeness deepens. Irises form gateways leading to somewhere. What lies beyond their razor-thin threshold of perception? The soul, so they say, mediated in the shimmering membrane of the mirrored self or in the bottomless pit of another’s pupil. And then there’s the gap. That place where things vanish. The smoothed-over void, designed to be forgotten. A blind spot. Missing information fused seamlessly into cohesive illusion. 

Suspended throughout Anne Libby’s Even Odd, patinated frames arch to rim the perimeter of great cosmic eyes. Wide-open they hover, bifurcated and intersecting. Eyes doubled, staggered, conjoined. Split and flipped at their core, the otherworldly hues foretell an estranged new vision with the site of sight now bent and bizarre. Unified from the center out, a third omnipresent eye manifests and scans panoptically from an omnidirectional view. 

Libby’s Organelles (all works 2024) evoke the fundamental liminality of life itself. Like their sub-cellular biological counterparts, these half-autonomous, half-dependent demi-organs recall mitosis: the quiet yet radical act of division and regeneration where rupture is not an end but a means of mutation and replication. Dualities of seen and unseen, open and closed, whole and part, singular and multiple, move beyond rigid contrasts. Rather, they function as thresholds, points of transition where distinctions blur and a synthesis comes into focus. Here, opposition is not an endpoint but a prelude to transformation.

Through a glass-paned mobile, reflections of stained-glass irises fold into transparency. Flipping between observer and object, the shifting aperture collapses, confusing what’s seen and what’s seeing back. To view is to confront. To see is to be seen, implicated in their unblinking scrutiny. 

Vision, after all, is never innocent. Split and mirrored, Libby’s orbs hover in this transitory space, spinning out from a centrifugal force that binds inside and outside, like an organ perched at the edge of biology and dream logic where phenomenology distorts into a kind of haunting.

Beyond the mechanics of ocular registration, the ancient talisman of the evil eye unwaveringly awaits. More warning or shield than weapon, its wrath only ever reflects the jagged envy of another when a cursed gaze folds back on itself. To look is never passive but always a negotiation of power as it surveils, penetrates, judges. The scrutinizing gaze—whether belonging to a state or corporation, envy or erotics—holds power over its subjects.

A selection of contorted window blinds cast in polished aluminum are positioned alongside Libby’s mobiles. Their surfaces invert their function, refracting light instead of blocking; beyond separating to reflect divisions of public and private. Rough glass peepholes puncture the metallic facades of these sculptures. As transparency corrodes the gleaming slats, erosions become intrusions looking through the mirrored partition.

—Marie Heilich