Trisha Donnelly

Trisha Donnelly

Exhibition: Apr 28 – Jul 17, 2005


When isolated, Trisha Donnelly’s economical gestures seem veiled in code like the spare lines of a poem. However, considered together in this, the artist’s first solo institutional show, past and present works from the last several years build a layered argument for the importance of sound and time. The projects urge the viewer to surrender to the ephemeral’s role in how we pass through life.

The notion of journey is introduced by Passenger, which spells out “tH PSNGR” in graphite on paper nine feet tall. Insistent, the piece’s graceful monumentality does not ask us to come along but describes circumstances as they are. We are always on the move and constantly in the path of new discoveries.

Untitled* (*title is audio) hints at what might be found along the way. Pinned to the wall are twelve slightly different thirty-inch drawings of a hollow cylinder. This flipbook strategy infuses a banal object with the real-time phenomenon of perception and conjures the multi-faceted process of seeing. Increasing the sense of potential in the everyday, viewers who ask for the drawing’s title are played a CD. The thump thump of a drumbeat not only focuses attention on the frequency of life’s encounters but also ceremonializes the act of looking.

The physicality of sound is further explored in The Shield, a one hour audio loop emitted by speakers on either side of the gallery that create a boundary. The threshold made by the synthetic noise panning from floor to ceiling is unquestioned; choosing to cross is ignoring the breadth of what is there.

Untitled, an eight-foot tall E written in blood-red enamel, invokes the immaterial through ancient Egypt, a culture wherein earthly elements supported a dynamism dismissed today. This piece abstractly conjures this now-mystical way of understanding, while other works in the exhibition do so with the snapshot. Hand that holds the desert down is a five-inch silver gelatin print of the eroding sphinx built to protect pharaohs entombed nearby in the desert outside of Cairo. The slight image functions as a portal from the rationality of the 21st century to the otherworldly notions of Mesopotamia.

A commitment to re-awakening such energy is articulated in the two-part Untitled. On one side of a wall is a pencil drawing of a tightly knit mass of space resembling a dark, body-less cloak. Available upon request is a view around the corner. There hangs a complimentary image—the same shape made convex, lighter, and cast in a kinetic blue. This is what a drawing looks like after it passes through the barrier that seems to stop it.

Trisha Donnelly’s works poetically collapse the mundane and the complex. If one succumbs to seeing the world as her pieces suggest, surroundings expand into a wondrous mix of images, sound, and time that yield infinitely new sensations. As revealed by Volume, a three-foot tall sheet of white paper punctuated by a simple pencil drawing of a knob, choosing to perceive (not believe) is liberating. With this handle we can each adjust the vigor of the show and temper our understanding of life.

-Kate Green,
Assistant Curator

Artist

Trisha Donnelly

San Francisco, California, USA

San Francisco-based Trisha Donnelly’s enigmatic drawings, photographs, videos, sound works, and performative demonstrations resist normative perceptions of the world. Often perplexing, the works reflect an ethereal outlook in which sound and visual expression are not confined to disparate realms but join forces to affect experience.
The potency of Donnelly’s projects comes from this oscillation. Whether sketching the aural sensation of a beating drum, suggesting that human hand signals can create rain miles away, or asking an audience to close their eyes and listen to “the sound that stops time,” the pieces drift in and out of grasp. Riding alongside the quotidian, they make visible currents that often go unnoticed.
Like the poetry of John Ashbery that she admires, the artist’s works intoxicate by pivoting between exquisite representations of the everyday and complex inscriptions of other dimensions. The projects confidently resist questioning—drawings simply do extend through walls and musical notes have corporeal presence.
Donnelly’s artworks heighten awareness of the immaterial and articulate the wonder of what is. Instead of engaging in a dialogue about belief, her poetic projects dip into romanticism and test assumptions to expose myths about existence and the power and possibilities of art.

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