Exhibition Essay by John Seed
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
A woman, an island, the moon
Islands are simultaneously protected and isolated by the waters that surround them. These circular paintings are like miniature islands that encompass the life of my invented female protagonist and her small world. The circle, saturated color, and pattern allow me to explore metaphors for isolation and belonging, boundaries and openness, hope and hopelessness, home and homeland. This alternative constructed reality is observed from numerous points of reference including the protagonist, her cohabitants, an omniscient voyeur, and the viewer. My protagonist occupies a space that is simultaneously somewhere and nowhere. She exists between multiple and contradictory, realities. Expansive waters separate and connect here from there, yesterday from tomorrow, and a woman and her island from the moon.
Visiting Artist Lecture
Bowling Green State University
Visiting Artist Lecture
Thursday December 1, 5pm
M o t h e r l o a d
Miami University
Hiestand Galleries, North Gallery
Oxford, Ohio
September 7 - October 6, 2016
Reception for the Artist: Thursday Sep 22, 4-5pm followed by lecture 5:30-6:45pm
M o t h e r l o a d
Exhibition at First Street Gallery, 526 W. 26th Street, Room 209, NY, NY 10001
May 24 - June 18, 2016
Reception June 2, 2016: 6-8pm
Exhibition essay written by Peter Malone:
As most of us are now resigned to a perennially unsettled art world, we have evolved a near routine resilience to sudden changes in an artist’s direction. And yet changes can still be unnerving, especially for those who have followed an artist for a considerable period, only to find them one day a stranger. Presented with a new vision, members of an artist’s audience are likely to feel themselves compelled—one is tempted to say coerced—into intensifying their participation as an audience member.
Considering that for more than a decade Teresa Dunn’s work has consisted of complex figural compositions, it is understandable that her audience might feel a bit uneasy with this new work. At first glance it looks like a substantial change. But closer examination will reassure the skeptical that these paintings and studies represent modest re-considerations made well within Dunn’s familiar sensibility. They are a continuation of the other-worldly sense her work has always addressed, though adapted to an unpacking of her painterly process. It is as if the loose outlines beneath her earlier compositions are
now spreading like vines across a long established garden.
Dunn’s earlier pictures can be understood to some extent as related to the literary conceits of magic realism. “Doubling Back, 2014“, for instance, placed tourists, wreck survivors, elephants and fragments of ancient statuary on a beach, illuminated by a massive conflagration on the horizon precisely where a travel-brochure sunset belongs, while silhouettes of tourists and umbrellas, entirely out of scale with the other figures in the painting, sit calmly in the background. Dunn is quite upfront about how her, ”...narratives explore identity and relationships through the absurd. Animals, food, and objects are [just
as] important as humans by becoming symbolic, metaphorical or characters themselves. Peculiar reality becomes normal, as in dreams or memory.”
This normalizing of the absurd continues in the new work, though in a more abstracted and looser syntax. Faces emerge from dense brushwork. Hints of still life mix with what seems like foliage. As with her earlier work, the acceptance of uncanny events and appearances remains. It is the same acceptance that punctuates the narrative of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Isabel Allende, for whom Dunn holds more than a passing familiarity, having read them in the original Spanish. These writers maintain their strangeness by holding to an atmosphere of vivid realism. It is what separates them from the Eurocentric and Freudian tone of Surrealism.
There is no subversion of reality in magic realism, only a stubborn naturalness, interrupted at times by a highly poetic irrationality. To the extent that the new paintings contain hints of recognizable yet incongruent imagery—still-life, figures, a visual flow that transitions in several directions at once—they are a continuation of the same dream structure, but rendered this time more susceptible to serendipity and surface pattern. Or to put it another way, Dunn’s new imagery is more in synch with the ebb and flow of actual painting.
Though the touch and painterly texture of Dunn’s method is relatively unchanged—a preference for small brushes working expansive fields remains intact—the formatting is noticeably different. Multiple panels are now employed, permitting her to expand on a composition in distinct stages, the continuity of the whole to be adjusted as each panel progresses. The cautionary space created by such compartmentalizing allows for more freedom of expression within each panel. Hence, the final composition is often a blending of several large ideas, occasionally surrendering parts of their outer imagery to the outer edges of their abutting sections, while maintaining enough individual integrity to hold their places as distinct parts of a coherent composition. As a metaphor in the service of dreaming while awake—the essence of magic realism—the partial unity it creates helps to reinforce simultaneous realities.
The second and rather obvious change is in the scale of the new work. “Slippage” is a five by ten foot triptych of three panels each measuring 60 x 40”. Even as sub-units of the whole, they are larger than the paintings Dunn exhibited in 2014. In fact, Slippage’s overall dimensions measure four times larger than any one of her earlier paintings. This increase in size indicates an expansion of the process itself. Dunn is transitioning her subject matter from ideas to events; from narratives paralleling spoken language to narratives that unfold through the act of painting and consequently through our visual reading of her painting process.
The smaller studies in the show act as guides along Dunn’s new path. As a member of a tiny minority of contemporary painters who have tackled the truly daunting genre of multiple figure composition, the fact that many of these studies are experiments with collage and the notoriously renegade technique of monotype is telling. Their spontaneity, more than any single aspect of the new work, speaks to a substantial ambition. Confident that she remains aligned intellectually and emotionally with her earlier work, Dunn is willing to let the painting process and the atmosphere of the studio itself become the
reality that in turn provides the context for her “...peculiar occurrences”. As the next step in her evolution, the work in this exhibition is not just logically motivated, it seems inevitable.
—Peter Malone