Feb 15th 2013

Ann Toebbe: The Inheritance

@ Ebersmoore

350 North Ogden Ave, Suite 100 Chicago, IL 60607

Opening Friday, February 15th, from 6PM - 9PM

On view through Saturday, March 30th

EBERSMOORE is please to announce gallery artist Ann Toebbe’s upcoming solo show, The Inheritance. This will be Ann’s first solo show with the gallery.

The Inheritance is a series of portraits about a botched inheritance. The story is from Toebbe’s parents: when her mother Margie was in her 20s in Cincinnati, she met two sisters, Dorothy and Jessie. Dorothy and Jessie, who lived together and never married, became lifelong friends of the Toebbe family. Dorothy and Jessie also owned a small fortune in shares of Proctor & Gamble stock, a portion of which they promised to Toebbe’s parents as an inheritance. Dorothy and Jessie lived into their nineties, and passed away in 2007.

Dorothy and Jessie also left shares of their P&G stock to their handyman and caretaker, Ron; to their church pastor, and to a man from their church named Loreaux. But when Dorothy and Jessie died, Loreaux claimed a greater share and sued the estate. While the lawsuit was pending the stock market crashed; by the time it was all over, the fortune was all but wiped out. Toebbe’s parents had counted on the inheritance for their retirement, but because of Loreaux’s greed, all they inherited was frustration, disappointment, and anger.

For the portraits, Toebbe drew from her mother’s stories and family photographs, as well as her own childhood memories and photographs from a vintage dollhouse museum in Joplin, Missouri. Toebbe composes the portraits as paintings, but she also utilizes cut paper collage along with bits of fabric, yarn, flocking, and other manufactured materials, including recycled painted paper and tracings from previous projects.

Together, the portraits and drawings of The Inheritance explore intersections of expectation and abstraction, memory and materiality – and an unfulfilled desire for vengeance.

Toebbe received her MFA from Yale University in 2004. She was a DAAD scholar in 2004 and received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2005. Solo exhibitions include Branch Gallery in Durham, NC, Steven Zevitas in Boston, MA, and The MCA Chicago. Her work is in the Saatchi Collection and is currently on view in Open House: Art About Home at the Elmhurst Museum.

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