Artist Ann Resnick is moving around large scrolls in preparation to adorn the walls of the Salina Art Center gallery. Ksenya Gurshtein, an independent curator, is also there helping her. There are six works in this exhibition, but that does not begin to describe the scope of work on display.
“This project is kind of impossible to explain. There's so much detail,” Gurshtein said. “Anne was telling me this grand vision that she had. There's this practice called scrying — trying to see patterns and looking beyond the veil — it comes from the world of the occult.”
Exhibiting these scrolls in 2025 was the impetus for their investigation, leading to a second part of the exhibit this year.
“Anne had a vision of this being a preamble to this larger project called ‘Tell Me What You Think of Me,’ which is what we are installing right now,” Gurshtein said. “Her vision was that there would need to be a survey — a kind of quasi or pseudo-scientific process of interpreting data — that we would collect from participants.”
Forty-six people took the survey, and through Resnick’s processes, the interpreted results are on display.
“We found two psychologists, a sociologist and a tarot reader, [and used them] as an extended meditation on compatibility and how we think about human compatibility,” Gurshtein said.
Gurshtein leads me to the second room off the main gallery. On one wall are wood-framed and repetitive, but alternating, design works on paper.
“They look like these elaborate, very lovely wallpaper designs, but embedded in each is the name of Myers Briggs Personality Type,” Gurshtein said. “This is an ISFP, and it's mirrored this way, and it's mirrored this way, and that's what creates the design.”
The work reveals as much about the observer as it does the participants from last year's exhibit.
“It's such a perfect metaphor for what the psychology of personality assessments at least promises,” Gurshtein said. “You can look at something that looks like, ‘Oh, it's just wallpaper, it's background, it's beautiful, but inconsequential.’ But if you know, this is the right thing to look for, right? There is this kind of knowledge and insight that opens up to you and it tells you something meaningful about the person you're interacting with.”
On the opposite wall is a handwriting analysis. In the next room are woodcrests with QR codes that are tied to professional analysis of the data. In the same room, but on the opposite side, are light boxes similar to the scrolls in the main room. In all circumstances, the scope of the individual amongst the many is revealed. Back in the main gallery is a wall full of drawings.
“This work, it's 158 individual drawings by 49 different artists, and it's called ‘20 Questions.’ Once we asked all the standard demographic data, ...we asked for people's astrological signs. We asked them for a writing sample. We asked for their Myers-Briggs Personality Type. And we asked, ‘What is your favorite plant, animal and bird.’”
Resnick asked these questions to see who’s compatible.
“This is going to sound weird because ... you can't see that in all of this now,” Resnick said, “but the first question in my mind was, ‘Can we all just get along?’”
Resnick asked artist friends to participate in the show and they’re represented in the drawings of favorite plants, animals and birds.
“Maybe we can find some commonality in smaller things,” Resnick said. “Maybe we all have the same favorite bird. George Saunders did a great interview with The New York Times, and he quoted Chekhov, ‘Art doesn't have to give you the answer. [It] just has to finalize the questions. [It] just has to present the questions.”
