Irish Arts Review, Spring (March-May) issue, 2012.
Review of "The Consoling Dream Necessity" by Sue Rainsford, Arthub.ie 26th January 2012.
Cecilia Danell's Consoling Dream Necessity @ Talbot Gallery & Studios
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.
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.
The review with images can be found HERE.
Review of "The Consoling Dream Necessity" by Jeanette Donnelly, Art For Art's Sake Online Review. January 2012.
The Award Winners Derek Fortas and Cecilia Danell
Talbot Gallery and Studios and Copper House Gallery treated us to two receivers of prestigious art prizes recently. Copper House presented Derek Fortas and his first solo show 'Coal Story', while Talbot Gallery treated us to Cecilia Danell's 'The Consoling Dream Necessity'.
Cecilia Danell, a Swedish artist based in Galway has recently received the 5th Annual Emerging Artists Award of 2011 and The Arts Council Project Award 2011, to name a few. Her work is tightly wound around a personal search for meaning amidst a contemporary lifestyle. If you will, a historical walk along a busy road. It is not difficult to see that her native heritage is the informant for subject matter and concept. Her paintings, such as 'Within Range', depict forests showcasing mainly the trunks of trees rather than branches or leaves. This view within the paintings allow them to seem familiar, almost as if the viewer has been welcomed into a snapshot of a previous memory. The highlight of the show was 'Build your own Scandinavian Loneliness'. Construct a house and scenery from a cardboard box filled with felt, branches and a flat-pack house. It reminded me of a trip to Ikea. This piece opened up the argument of 'Art for Everyone'. It allowed the viewer, at the price of 40 euro, to take home a do-it-yourself art piece. I carried two Felix Gonzalez-Torres pieces home from the 2007 Venice Biennale and am ashamed to say I have never framed or mounted either but are neatly rolled up and stored. I fear 'Build your own Scandinavian Lonliness' could find a similar end. At 40 euro each though, its a bargain for this up-and-comer.
The potential of this artist is evident in her application of the paint. Danell has developed her own style, but, has not quite reached her full potential yet. One of the most exciting aspects of an up-and-coming artist is watching them devlop and hone their style. This one will be interesting, so, watch this space!
Read the rest of the review HERE.
Article in Motala & Vadstena Tidning, Sweden 28/12/11.
"Irish Art Award to Cecilia" - The article talks about my work, winning the Wexford Arts Centre Emerging Artist Award, how I draw inspiration from my Scandinavian upbringing and my life in Ireland.
Read the (slightly shorter) online version HERE
Image Interiors & Living, Ireland January/February 2012 issue.
Ireland's Home Interiors & Living, Ireland February 2012 issue.
Article about the group show "(Un)familiar" at the Red House Arts Center, Syracuse, NY.
'Redhouse Irish: Galway Arts Centre returns a second year', Syracuse City Eagle, March 18 2010. By: Nancy Keefe Rhodes
Extract featuring my work:
Danell has two paintings in this show and a looped video installation titled "Doubles" from a larger project. Over Christmas she went home to Sweden and filmed two empty shelters where hunters wait for moose and deer - we would know them as "blinds" - in a bleak winter woods around her parents home, then made scale models, and then made paintings of the models.
Her video begins with a text attributed to the artist Eugene Delacroix from 1824, "There is always a thick crust to be broken before I can give my whole heart to anything." We're taken into a deep woods at dusk that fades to views of the shelters, dark stretches of trees, a distant fire-like glow through the forest, and the solarium-like porch of a house, lit from within - actually Danell's own house - into which a seemingly doubled apparition of a long-haired woman enters and dances with herself. The video has an audio of spare music, which alternates tracks so you hear it first through one ear and then the other, available via headphones.
"She's working here with the Jungian idea of 'home' and stages of removal from the truth and what you could believe," said Mulrennan. "She loves Ireland, and she looks Irish too - she has red hair and an accent like Mayo - but she does lots of work elsewhere too. She's done a residency in Berlin, for example, that's about architectural spaces, about the emotional impact of space."
The full article about all the participating artist can be found HERE
Brochure Issue number two - By Niall Moore for A&G, 2008.
Publication featuring my painting 'Appendage #3'
Download a PDF version at: www.aandgltd.com
More info at: www.brochure2.wordpress.com
Degree show Critic's choice - Review by Michaële Cutaya.
Circa 125 - Contemporary visual culture in Ireland. Autumn 2008 issue, page 62.
'Is this Utopia?' Cecilia Danell, Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology Degree show 2008.
It probably was the title that did it: in these days of atrophied imagination, in which fears stand in for political program, the very mention of Utopias is enough to suggest times when a better future was still being dreamt.
The initial impression of Cecilia Danell's show is one of a brightly coloured playfulness. The show is suffused with 1960s imagery, from the geometric designs of the wallpaper covering the installation room to the photographed retro objects, which are part of the artist's collection. It is however more pointedly to modernist architecture that Danell's work refers through painting and animation.
In a five-minute animated short, Is this Utopia, a curvilinear-patterned world is the set for a series of arrangements of urbanistic elements, the construction and deconstruction of buildings using Lego blocks - themselves a legacy of that 1960s optimism that the world is ours to be built in endless colourful possibilities. The alienating effects of such planning are pointed to by having round Maltesers-looking creatures attempting to inhabit this cubic world.
The top-down thinking underlying modern urbanism is furthered alluded to in a series of one-metre-square paintings. In the luridly idealistic colours of an advertisement are represented views of Stockholm's suburbs which are disrupted by prominent areas of splashed and dripped paint. The featureless spaces left in the painting seem to suggest the ultimate unfathomability of the inhabitants.
Alternatively, these vacant and uncertain shapes superimposed over the representation of places which were inspired by modernist utopias, could be left to be filled by future ones.
Michaële Cutaya is an
artist and writer living
in Galway.
The card that won the 2005 GMIT Christmas Card competition:
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