Despite being so often seen as a conceptual artist, Trisha Donnelly is known for her reluctance to provide viewers with hermeneutical parameters to navigate her work. As always, no press releases or checklists are available at this solo show, and the art itself is relentlessly taciturn and unresponsive to imposed interpretations. Nonetheless, it undeniably commands attention, and viewers must encounter it with recourse to nothing but their senses.
The exhibition includes four marble sculptures (all Untitled, 2023) is somewhat reminiscent of Donnelly’s earlier stone monoliths, although geometrically accurate in a much more architectural way. The visitor’s journey through the exhibition is determined both by the layout of the gallery and the sequence of works. Each object occupies its own room-size area, and there is only one vantage point, at the very end of the gallery, from which two are visible at a time. Yet even from this vantage point, both sculptures seem to claim an exclusive claim on the viewer’s gaze.
The first sculpture is gray and straight, a sturdy slab with fine lines etched into its convex front face and hollowed-out sections elsewhere. The second is similar, though taller, with more severely chiseled cracks whose crimson complexion inevitably evokes open wounds. The fourth piece is also straight, but it is much thinner and eschews the play of technological exactness and physical distress in favor of a woody finish. The third and most striking work of art is a long, narrow shape that rests horizontally on the floor and ends in a rough knot of unpolished marble. It is paradoxically reminiscent of science fiction artillery fragments and classical ruins. In this sense, he characterizes the way in which all the pieces are imprinted with an indeterminate temporality, like missives from both the distant past and the future.
