Ana Žanic @ Rober F. DiCaprio Art Gallery at Moraine Valley Community College

Ana Žanic’s Watercolor and Ceramic Work Speaks to Dislocation

The Croatian American artist is part of a century-long lineage of artists who have sought to probe the boundaries of material, gesture and control.

August 12, 2025 – September 21, 2025

Ana Žanic’s resonant solo exhibition at Moraine Valley Community College is proof positive that those of us who live outside of the city limits don’t always have to battle gridlock on Chicago’s arteries or the everlasting reconstruction of the Kennedy Expressway to see a body of artwork suffused with candor and insight.

Žanic, who emigrated from Croatia about two decades ago, creates watercolor paintings and small sculptural objects that are informed by dislocation and longing, as well as adaptation and reinvention. Her paintings allude to both micro and macro landscapes, from the watery environment of a cell or pond to the birthing chambers of a nebula. The sculptures typically function as supporting players, manifesting shapes, colors and textures from the paintings in three dimensions.

Central to her process is the use of pours and broad-brush layers of watercolor over absorbent paper and Yupo, a non-porous synthetic material on which pigments and dyes “swim” until evaporated. Žanic frequently returns to these pours and layers after they dry to add zips, squiggles and repeating rows of short, vertical marks in pencil that float across the surface like plankton or migrating birds.

The installation at Moraine Valley’s Robert F. DeCaprio Art Gallery alternates between small to mid-size paintings under plexiglass and large, unframed sheets of paper hung with magnets (long and narrow horizontal strips as well as grids made up of four sheets of equal size). The framed works are rich in visual information that invites careful examination. When Žanic pairs the paintings with her ceramic “Reef Pods,” a nice cadence develops across the wall. Additional ceramic pods are clustered on a long wall shelf as a stand-alone installation, but they are better alongside the paintings where the contrasting media and spatial dimensions foreground the peculiar details on the pods, which look like they’ve been exhumed from marine sediment.

Žanic’s facility with watercolor and her pouring/brushing technique is on full display in the three gridded works—“Smoke,” “Hum” and “Echo”—that comprise her “Personal Totem Series.” These works also exemplify her ability to relinquish control of her process—and then reclaim it—at just the right moment, resulting in works that hover between states of resolution, like an electron that is neither entirely particle nor wave until its momentum and location are measured.

Standing in front of the three “Totem” works, each roughly five by four feet, it’s not obvious whether we’re looking at something on a microscopic or grand scale or whether from above, below or straight-on. Or are we looking through the image into another dimension, as the burn holes that expose the wall behind the paper imply? Those same burn holes, along with the slight overlap among the paper sheets at the work’s equator and prime meridian, simultaneously ground the viewer by returning attention to the basic materials from which the work is made and hung: paper, paint, pencil, flame and magnets.

The constant fluctuation between orientations, image and object, and scales of observation is analogous to the disorientation an immigrant experiences in her new home. It also speaks to the weirdness of human consciousness, particularly the way in which we oscillate dozens if not hundreds of times per minute between our headspace and the environment that exists beyond our retinae and cutaneous receptors.

Žanic is part of a century-long lineage of artists who have sought to probe the boundaries of material, gesture and control. This month, the Block Museum opens a show of experimental prints by Helen Frankenthaler, the doyenne of the pouring/staining strategy. What keeps Žanic’s approach fresh and engaging is her embrace of transparency. As she explains in her statement, watercolor, a medium that is light, spontaneous and intimate, always shows the entire process. Mistakes can’t be covered up. “I see, in this vulnerability, a metaphor for life itself.”

(Published in Newcity, September 19, 2025)