The Consoling Dream Necessity is the title of Cecilia Danell’s solo exhibition in the Talbot Gallery. A few general facts about the artist are that she was 2011′s winner of the Wexford Arts Centre Emerging Artist Award – only announced within the last few months, and that she is Swedish. Though I’m for the most part hesitant where biographical analysis is concerned, her country of origin is a stated presence in this show. The paintings are imbued with a sparseness and a loneliness that is carried off by painterly technique as much as by the subject matter itself. What we are perhaps looking at is images of a secluded, distant Dystopia, somewhere we all recognise perhaps not for its landscape but for the associated feelings of estrangement and ostracism. The question raised is at what point do we all of us come to spend time in this setting? How deeply can we question ‘the self’ and spend time in our own minds before coming up against this wall of ‘otherness’?
There is an emphasis on fabrication in the exhibition – clearly demonstrated in the two installation pieces, and reflected also in the paintings with an insistence on our physical encounter with the landscape. Both this focus on ‘making’ and the potential for pathetic fallacy are evident in the project Build Your Own: Scandinavian Loneliness. Within a cardboard box are all the materials you need to construct your own segment of snow-clad wilderness. As well as referencing the physical and emotional landscape that constitutes her heritage, it also comments on the impact of the landscape on the individual. Elaborated further in the paintings is this power our surroundings have over us in terms of mood, but say we were to morph our naturual environment with the force of our emotions, or indeed if they were to be fused in one entirety? What then? Despite an emphasis on the exterior, the paintings also refer greatly to our inner-life, demonstrating a realisation that inner and outer can be made interchangeable; boundaries can be blurred up to the point of negation, so that we can’t tell if the images are abstract and skewed visuals or landscapes made strange by inward turbulence. With Build Your Own: Scandinavian Loneliness there are unusual connotations; ‘build your own’ suggests something everyone else has, something it’s reasonable for you to covet. If everyone has one, why shouldn’t you? And yet what we’re incited to construct is ‘loneliness’, and not only that but specifically Scandinavian Loneliness. With this direct tie to the artist’s biography and heritage we can’t ignore the outright personal dimension introduced, a facet that the paintings enhance and complement.
A small installation piece in the form of a yellow flash-light, A Tribute to Thomas Demand is a reproduction of one of flash-lights that played such an important role in Demand’s 2001 piece, Poll, which replicated in paper the setting of the Florida recount in the 2000 election between George Bush and Al Gore. The recount depended largely on incompletely punched holes next to the candidates’s names on the ballot paper, and the flashlights were used to determine whether or not the votes could be counted. This reference to the material and tangible well accents Danell’s work – a reference to the role of paper in a major historical event, which is further established in Demand’s reproduction with paper as the medium, and then again with Danell’s tribute.
A Tribute to Thomas Demand
In previous exhibitions, the mundane associations of such installation materials as graph paper, paper clips and twigs have been thrown into relief by the strangeness of the connotations they provoke. Similarly in The Consoling Dream Necessity, the strangeness of the landscape depicted is made stark by the familiarlity it instills in us. Feelings of alienation and division are conjured by these images; what we see are the universal ramifications of what we assume to be insular and personal, so that paradoxically through feelings of estrangement a simultaneous sense of ‘connectedness’ emerges. Strange places seem familiar because something transcendental is invoked; we are cautious and conscious, always, of our own ephemerality and our emotional distance from others. This knowledge of an irreparable schism between the individual and the rest of the world is a persistent psychological theme, and Danell’s landscapes represent that space between our psyche and outside consciousness for the happenstance viewer as they perhaps represent for her a dissolving immediacy with her background and heritage.
As part of February’s First Thursdays Danell will be in conversation with Jennie Moran at the Talbot Gallery at 6pm on February 2nd.
Sue Rainsford has written 26 articles on this blog.
Artist, writer, photographer, occasional critic. http://humfuil.tumblr.com
