by matt moment

Annika Tucksmith, The Turkey in the Late-Afternoon, 2024, oil on panel, 40 x 48 inches

Skinny dippers, bonfires, and enough animals for a petting zoo are brought to life in the paintings of Annika Tucksmith, one of the six women artists featured in Carrie Haddad Gallery’s current group show, Understories. The exhibition occurs at a significant moment in Tucksmith’s early career: As her paintings are regularly snagged by collectors, her mentors at Columbia University — where she is currently pursuing an MFA in painting — are encouraging Tucksmith to test the limits of the medium. While the what and where of her paintings have remained consistent, she has begun to experiment with her handling of paint. “How else can I create these feelings and moods? To activate the paint?” she posited.

Annika Tucksmith, My Childhood Rabbit, 2023, oil on panel, 24 x 24 inches

The artist was raised in Chatham, New York, alongside four siblings “on a street with enough children for substantial kickball games,” to borrow her words. Tucksmith’s fascination with visual art began in early childhood, though she did not paint until her first year of undergrad, when she took an introductory painting class “because all of the other courses I wanted to take were full.” She would go on to graduate from Connecticut College New London with distinction in art, and thereafter established a regular studio practice while working as a high school art teacher. After several years of refining her craft via paintings she would gift to friends and family, Tucksmith decided it was time to do more with the work she was producing; she shared her paintings with Carrie Haddad Gallery and, in 2021, made her debut in its Invitational Exhibit.

Tucksmith at her studio by Matt Moment

More often than not, the subjects of Tucksmith’s paintings are people. These protagonists are often fair-haired youths, modeled after herself and her younger siblings. In Tucksmith’s narrative paintings, such as “Trust Fall,” the figures occupy but a small fraction of the picture space. They congregate in forested areas, where their bodies are shrouded in thickets of greenery and conversation is obscured by the rush of a nearby creek. At this scale and in this setting, Tucksmith establishes solitude, an integral component in her paintings. Paired with the ambiguous activities that her characters are engaged in — whether they’re somersaulting around a bonfire or skinny-dipping in iridescent waters — the scenes are made to glow with possibility of the dangerous, electrifying sort that fuels most adolescent escapades worth remembering.

Tucksmith’s presentation in Understories joins such works with others that evidence a deeper consideration of paint as a material. Whereas the aforementioned style of painting offers refined technique and narrative profundity, many of her recent works were spawned of a quicker, looser hand that is inclined toward chimeric representations of color. The subjects of “Fawn” and “My Childhood Rabbit,” for example, lack a relationship to an object or space, and thus do not engage an overt narrative. Instead, she relies on sententious mark-making to weight the piece with psychic intensity. Both works were “painted negatively,” says Tucksmith; to create them, she covered the panels with deliberate strokes of blue paint, then used a rag to remove it, exposing the underlying luminosity of the canvas. The features of the fawn and rabbit are defined by the erasures, whereas the leftover strokes of blue effectuate form and movement.

Annika Tucksmith, The Performers, 2024, oil on panel, 30 x 40 inches

Regardless of their manner of creation, however, Tucksmith feels all of her paintings are related. “I see them as the same ideas expressed in different ways,” she explained. “They’re all coming from the same place.”