Autofictions
Autofictions
April 18 – May 22, 2026
1 Rivington Street, New York
Darrel Ellis, Libuše Jarcovjáková, Abby Robinson, Gail Thacker and Ann Weathersby
CANDICE MADEY is pleased to present Autofictions, an exhibition of five photographers—Darrel Ellis, Libuše Jarcovjáková, Abby Robinson, Gail Thacker, and Ann Weathersby. These artists’ works blur the boundaries between documentary and fiction while playfully exploring gender dynamics and genres of portraiture and self-portraiture. Each of the artists in Autofictions is highly experimental, creating narrative through unexpected processes, structures, and acute emotional resonance.
The exhibition’s title references the recent wave of exceptional literary fiction by such writers as Annie Ernaux, Karl Ove Knausgård, Edouard Louis, Garth Greenwell, Ben Lerner, Chris Kraus, Ocean Vuong, and many others. Emerging from a long tradition of autobiographical novelists, including Proust, this tendency finds a parallel in photography—from Claude Cahun, a contemporary of Proust, to 1970s photographers such as Friedl Koubelka and Abby Robinson, and in seminal works like Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency in the 1980s. The persistence of the diaristic and the performative gives the work a self-referential narrative shape
DARREL ELLIS—best known for his inventive fusion of sculptural surfaces and projected film to create obscured images of his family— presents here an intimate sequence portraying his close friends Miguel Ferrando and Todd Evan. While Ellis typically worked with existing photography, here he created staged images, directing his friends to dress in drag and enact stylized scenes of the Pietà, merging allegory, camp excess, and autobiographical trauma into a uniquely performative series.
ABBY ROBINSON also worked through iterative processes, most notably in a decades-long series of self-portraits she called AutoWorks. Inspired by her early experience as a private eye, the works are presented in variable, sequential formats that evoke seemingly infinite possibilities for personal storyboards. Their intimate scale and laminated finish suggest an alternative form of identification, replacing standard data-driven credentials with a more subjective persona.
GAIL THACKER, known for her staged and playful Polaroid portraits of performers from New York’s downtown scene in the ‘80s, ‘90s, and 2000s, presents new work that pushes the alchemical possibilities of Polaroid film. Thacker’s friend, artist Christen Clifford, poses in a classically inspired stance with a bow and arrow, evoking mythological female warriors such as Artemis, goddess of the wild, animals, and the hunt, as well as the Amazon queen Lampedo, a pagan heroine renowned for her archery and martial prowess.
LIBUŠE JARCOVJÁKOVÁ’s T-Club series documents the underground queer social club in Prague between 1983 and 1985, during the totalitarian period of former Czechoslovakia. These celebratory scenes depict underground revelers enacting freedom, love, and self-expression in defiance of a repressive communist regime. Recurring figures appear throughout the series, with Libuše herself often present. From a young age, the artist documented her own experiences and adventures, creating a body of work novelistic in scope.
ANN WEATHERSBY’s wall-based sculptures begin with research and collection. The artist has amassed an extensive archive of vernacular photography and rare vintage books from which she culls to build her compositions. In recent works, images of anonymous women are fossilized within colored glass panels that recall Minimalist sculpture. Removed from any original context, the found images and their anonymous subjects evoke a distant familiarity. The works’ titles are appropriated from texts by Weathersby’s favorite writers, such as Emily Dickinson, Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, Clarice Lispector, and Virginia Woolf.
—