Cynthia Daignault: As I Lay Dying
Past exhibition
-
-
Cynthia Daignault’s (b. 1978) first solo exhibition at the gallery explores the subject of Gettysburg National Military Park to propose a contemporary response to the genre of history painting. On view through January 8, 2022, the exhibition expands on themes explored in the artist’s earlier Light Atlas and Elegy series, investigating concepts of monument, memory, and the shifting experience of the natural world.
-
-
As I Lay Dying includes wide-ranging depictions of the battlefields and woodlands of the park, as well as paintings of text drawn from Lincoln’s historic address, and ghostly nocturnes of Civil War monuments. Daignault’s approach is a rumination on the meaning of site and time—time elapsed since the battle, time spent walking its fields, and time shared between the viewer and the work.
-
-
History painting, for Daignault, is an act of poetry. In this, her approach recalls the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who engaged with political history through the creation of quiet, specific and powerful metaphors. Just as in an imagist poem, each work here is a concrete, uncluttered response to the pathos of Gettysburg. As I Lay Dying explores personal and political American paradoxes—beauty and horror, love and cruelty, idealism and sin—and its works formally reflect these binaries—north and south, black and white, warm and cool. One work in the exhibition is stereoscopic; two panels depict left and right-eye views of the memorial cemetery, exploring concepts of parallax, shifting perspective, and multipartite narratives. These oppositional dualities ground the show, rooted in the central contradiction between the land and its historical context: Gettysburg has a banal and prosaic landscape that belies the bloody battles fought on its soil.
-
-
For Daignault landscape is witness, and she draws parallels between the environmental setting and the mechanical act of seeing. Her investigation into optics further acts as a metaphor for the polarities at the heart of American life and the reverberations of historical trauma. Gettysburg (witness tree), depicts a scene from her walks in the park: one of the few remaining civil war witness trees—a tree standing at the battle and still alive today. In the lineage of artists such as Richard Long, Daignault asks us to walk with her in order to learn how, or from which vantage point, we might better understand the past.
-
-
Works
-
-
About the Artist
Photo: Curran Hatleberg, courtesy of Cynthia Daignault -
Explore
-
Ian Davenport: Tides
October 30 – December 20, 2024 509 West 27th Street, New YorkIan Davenport’s latest works expand his series of poured acrylic paintings that spill across the gallery floor, employing the signature technique that defined the artist’s recent architectural interventions across Europe, namely in the Giardini at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017) and at the Chiostro del Bramante in Rome (2022-23). The exhibition also introduces metallic paint into Davenport’s artistic vocabulary, deepening the artist’s engagement with the colors and materials of Italian Renaissance painting. -
Elliott Puckette: Unfolding
October 30 – December 20, 2024 297 Tenth Avenue, New YorkThe artist's eleventh solo exhibition at the gallery features a suite of new paintings and bronze sculptures that expand upon the artist’s signature visual exploration of the line as a formal device to realize her atmospheric abstractions. -
Julie Hamisky: Transference
October 30 – November 23, 2024 514 West 28th Street, New YorkImmortalizing the most intricate details of the natural world, Julie Hamisky continues to garner international recognition for her rigorous electroplating technique that belies the ephemeral forces of nature. In freestanding sculptures, mirrors, chandeliers, and fine jewelry, Hamisky’s transformative approach to casting organic matter preserves fleeting moments in time.
-
