TRISHA DONNELLY
6 October to 16 December - FREE ADMISSION
Born in San Francisco in 1974, Trisha Donnelly is one of an important new generation of artists to have emerged internationally in recent years.
Donnelly works across just about every possible medium. Drawings, photographic images and recorded sound are rendered on a scale that ranges from the intimate to the monumental and presented as part of a staged choreography, often involving ephemeral events.
Donnelly adapts the conventions of art making with which we have become familiar in unexpected ways. She works with economy and invention. Texts function as drawings, drawings assume the physical presence of objects, sound defines forms. As an artist working in a period in which art is increasingly viewed as commercial product, Donnelly resists the mechanisms of visibility that we have come to expect, from art work as brand to the cult of the artistic persona. Rather, Donnelly’s work expresses less containable but nonetheless tangible impulses, in which our more automatic responses to things seen or heard are interrupted or re-directed into associative as well as physical dimensions that cut across space and time.
In preparing for her exhibition at Modern Art Oxford, Donnelly made several advance visits to the Gallery. The configuration of the three adjoining gallery spaces and their natural acoustics suggested to her a specific image, the traces of which form the basis of the exhibition here. Donnelly describes the image as “a state”, or “a field”. Each element, which she has produced for the exhibition, is an expression of this image or state.
In keeping with Donnelly’s desire to merge the experience of the work with that of the space, Donnelly made a number of subtle changes to the gallery spaces so as to enhance the quality of light, sound and sense of dramatic progression experienced. The layout is purposefully minimal. Each piece has a physical and narrative function within a spatial and allusive narrative of scenes, pulses, delays and hesitations.
Suzanne Cotter, Senior Curator
