Close your eyes and picture a scene at once peculiar, uncanny, yet strangely inviting: women drifting in hush aboard a stark-white bathtub fitted with oars, fish left quietly to dry in the background; a figure dissolving into the nocturnal dark from within a green sleeping bag beneath a makeshift tent; or a shadowy silhouette slowly absorbed by a towering bookcase, nothing visible but a pair of peering eyes.
The universe Sara Anstis constructs in soft pastel inhabits precisely this terrain—wandering the hazy peripheries of dreams, at the threshold where reason drifts to sleep.
In her latest exhibition at Olney Gleason, Anstis draws the viewer into small-scale yet emotionally monumental compositions where time bends. Longtime followers of her practice will recall her earlier penchant for a vibrant, almost neon-drenched palette. In this new chapter, however, something fundamental has shifted. Anstis tempers the velvet touch of pastel with the muted, gently fading earth tones of autumn—a chromatic departure that feels far from merely cosmetic. Rather, it is the organic outcome of an artist casting her gaze deep into art history, specifically toward the melancholic solemnity of the Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance.
Moving through the gallery, one readily encounters the quiet sorrow of a fifteenth-century Fra Angelico or an exquisite nod to Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine. Yet Anstis refuses to treat these historical precedents as sterile exercises in nostalgia. Instead, she installs motherhood, female kinship, and artistic creation at the core of a bespoke modern mythology. In one piece, women sleeping stacked atop one another in a single bed—as if tumbled from the pages of an old fairytale—whisper the naive, slightly eerie rhythm of a nursery rhyme.
Each scene is staged with the exacting precision of a cinematic still. A contemplative female silhouette gazing down at a lachrymatory—those miniature ancient glass phials once used to store perfume or catch the tears of mourners—reads like a muted dirge echoing across the frame. Elsewhere, a woman painter brandishing oversized brushes, her torso encased in paper armour, lays bare the visceral, profoundly physical toll of the creative act.
The tactile immediacy native to pastel, grounded in the direct friction of fingertips against paper, elevates these figures from passive imagery into living, breathing organisms. Whether riding horseback, painting, or simply staring into empty space, Anstis’s women claim their surroundings with an unmistakable physical and emotional authority.
A palpable sense of secret liturgy and quiet ritual permeates the entire exhibition. Testing the frontiers of logic while flirting with the absurd and the subtly caricatural, these works invite us to surrender to the irresistible, seductive unreason of the imagination. Unfolding in New York, this poetic suite of reveries offers an exquisite reason to summon the forgotten fables tucked away inside us.
