Dona Nelson, "All American Girl" (2000). Courtesy of Thomas Erben Gallery.
via The Brooklyn Rail, October 2006:
Dona Nelson
by Carrie Moyer
Brain Stain
Thomas Erben Gallery September 7–October 21, 2006
Dona Nelson continues to prove herself as a skilled interrogator of
painting. With impatience and glee, she addresses the fundamental
questions that have dogged painters over the past century—why, what and
how. By turns obstreperous, sexy, violent and transcendent, the six
canvases in Brain Stain manage a kind of metaphysical back
flip by using bodily experience (both the artist's and our own) to
point us inward towards the cerebral aspects of painting and its
history.
Nelson has spent many years thinking about the possibilities posed
by abstraction, leading her to make various bodies of work that
sometimes appear related, sometimes not. Her current exhibition
contains five gelatinous abstractions and "Walnut Way," an arid,
unprimed picture made by rubbing charcoal over the bas-relief of a
Nativity scene. The relative abstraction or representation in each of
Nelson's pictures, far from indulging in the current taste for
aesthetic smorgasbord, instead underscores her interest in painting
processes and how they generate symbiotic images. The artist's
well-known antipathy toward displaying a recognizable or "signature
style" can be traced back to the experimental attitudes that permeated
the New York City art world in the late 1960s when she was a student in
the Whitney Program. The practice of painting at that time had been
suffocated by Late Modernism's formalist and Marxist theorizing while
simultaneously trivialized by Pop Art. Serious painters attempted to
revitalize it by seeking direction and inspiration in the more
opened-ended forms of performance, video and sculpture.
One
of Nelson's abiding interests has been how to make a painting without "painting," i.e., without making an autographic mark. In the
large-scale "Mitchell Street," the surface is covered with viscous,
dark green skeins of cheesecloth and gravity-defying drips and spills
that come from all directions. A high-pitched yellow-green seeps up
from beneath the cheesecloth, alerting us to a surface that has been
literally washed and worn down by repeated applications of a
high-pressure water hose. Raised, snotty strands of cloth crisscross
the stained field, picking up and holding large areas of Pthalo green
paint. Nelson's use of cheesecloth to mediate between figure and ground
is one of her more brilliant moves. Building up the canvas by adding
muslin and cheesecloth before pouring the paint, Nelson creates a
self-reflexive relationship in which the figure is always pointing back
to the ground. Because they are both made of the same cotton material,
the figure and ground are no longer oppositional. Acrylic medium
becomes the goo that binds them together, like to like. [read full article]
