Teresa Dunn: Islands
What is modern art but the attempt to pinpoint vague, incorporeal, inexpressible sensations?
– Italo Calvino
Looking over artist Teresa Dunn’s recent series of tondo paintings—she calls them “Islands”—tends to bring up contradictory emotions: the images they carry are both comforting and unsettling. Tinged with nostalgia and animated by youthful memories, the series offers a narrative seen through the eyes of a female character who is both a stand-in for the artist and her independent invention. “My protagonist occupies a space that is simultaneously somewhere and nowhere,” Dunn explains. “She exists between multiple and contradictory, realities.” The alternate universe that Dunn’s series generates is a place of polarities and poetry, rich in overlaps between revelation and mystery.
Born to a Mexican mother and an American father, Dunn identifies as Mexican-American, having grown up conscious of being suspended between two distinctive cultures. Raised in a small Illinois town, Dunn understood some Spanish—but didn’t learn to speak it until adulthood—and spent a month every other year visiting with Mexican relatives. Although she played the piano and was encouraged to draw and paint, Dunn says it never occurred to her that she might want to be an artist: she entered college in Springfield Missouri as a math major with a scholarship. Two years later, during what she recalls as an “existential and intellectual crisis, Dunn began taking drawing classes and discovered that making art “felt like home.”
Her subsequent studies, including graduate work in art at Indiana University, deepened Dunn’s engagement with both figure drawing and the subject matter of identity and relationships. A trip to Italy—where she fell in love with the culture and made deep friendships in the city of Venice—gave her the sense of another home both literally and culturally. Dunn has been spending as much time as she can in Venice for the past decade, letting the feeling of its water and weather infuse her work while letting the works of her favorite writers—including Italo Calvino, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Elena Ferrante—expand and infuse her imaginative caprices.
Painting “a lot of water and boats” during an Italian sojourn led indirectly to the idea of painting a narrative series set on an island: Dunn actually painted her first tondos during a 2017 residency on Cuttyhunk island off the coast of Massachusetts, 12 miles south of New Bedford. The idea for an exhibition titled A woman, an island, the moon came to Dunn early on, providing a sense of focus as she developed still lifes and ideas. Starting each tondo with a randomly colored ground—sometimes bright sometimes neutral—helped Dunn vary moods, suggest weather and generate formal elements and their counterpoints.
For example, Dunn’s 2017 tondo “Landlocked” has a neutral, fleshy ground tone that is broken up by rough foreground stripes of orange, turquoise, mauve and yellow. The pattern of stripes morphs into wavelike patterns and darkens around a tiny figure standing in her boat, glancing towards the shaded vestiges of a toy-like harbor town. It’s a scenario that wakes up the senses and conjures enigmas. Its symbolic suggestions—of loneliness, internal conflict and difference—are both contained and harmonized by the serenity of the tondo: a Renaissance format used by Raphael and others to provide a sense of wholeness and stability. Dunn has an acute sensitivity towards the conflicting emotions that she portrays and her formal choices of color, tone and pattern resonate with the poetry created by these compositional and thematic forces and counterforces.
Travel and transportation—metaphors that appear in many of the key images—are often represented by toy objects that Dunn has borrowed from her six-year old daughter. In “Perfidy” a yellow vintage motorcycle activates the possible dual meanings of arrival and departure in front of a bird who looks out a window towards the moon and a white house set in a stand of pines. The title of the image—which refers to untrustworthiness or deceit—undercuts the viewer’s inclination to take any of the meanings suggested as literal or auto-biographical. “I've long felt that I'm a storyteller and I draw from my self and my observations of the world around me,” Dunn offers, “but my paintings are a kind of combination of fictive futures, imagined alternate realities, and dream-like perversions of past events.”
“Moonlight Tug,” which depicts a tugboat floating into a blue ocean/sky towards a partially painted white moon has a feeling of restlessness about it. It expresses the feeling of yearning that often accompanies childhood dreams: it appears to be set on a child’s quilt littered with dollhouses. The idea of a “tug”—a boat and an emotional pull—is just right for a painting that offers such a striking image of insomniac desire.
It's a fleeting image that feels both tangible and unresolved.
What Dunn does so masterfully with this painting—and in her recent series—is to invite her viewers to share the universal poetry of her paintings without divulging or insisting on any particulars. To do so would dampen their magic, which is nourished and sustained by the interchange between nostalgia and revelation: The poet Isabella Leardini—who Dunn has invited to respond to her work through poetry—understands this perfectly:
How the sense of all things lost
is revealed one day after another
in the stroke of a master who determines
the unexpected perfection that remains
- from Una stagione d’aria (A season of air)
—John Seed is an art historian and independent curator who has written for the Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, Arts of Asia, and other fine publications