Jan 18–Aug 3, 2008

Trisha Donnelly

About

Using sculpture, drawing, photographs, text, sound, video, and painting, Trisha Donnelly has composed this installation, her first solo museum exhibition in the United States, using works made between 1998 and 2007. In a breathtakingly spare gallery, 24 works of art are closely hung on a horizontal line. The works on display, which also include one sculpture and three different sound works, propose a reconfiguration of the past constructed from a rigorous, distinctly personal selection.

Trisha Donnelly’s ineffable body of work resists simple characterization. A lexicon of imagery and action relies on the power of suggestion: what precise, economical gesture can evoke a moment, a place, a feeling? How does sound create form? With a word, can the artist embed herself in our consciousness? These potent gestures are catalysts, and this is the crux of Donnelly’s work. What unite her media-diverse work are gestures of altered time, shifters, dimensional explorations, evocation, perception, and belief structures.

Time, literally and metaphorically, is a signature of Donnelly’s work: a drawing may request slowness, a sound piece may stretch a phrase interminably, a video presents an action in slow motion, a photograph freezes a turn of the torso. This pause generates shifts, fractures, and collapses in time, both in the present and in time’s historical reverberations. This exhibition, too, requests time.
Donnelly 1

Donnelly 1

Donnelly 2

Donnelly 2
Mon, Aug 26, 2013, 9:30PM
Last Dance: Dirty Looks at the End of Days
Sun, Aug 17, 2014, 8:20PM
ICA@50 Closing Party
Books & Editions
Trisha Donnelly book cover

This fuly illustrated catalogue documents Donnelly’s installation, her first U.S. solo museum exhibition, and includes an essay by Associate Curator Jenelle Porter

ISBN
9780884541141
Pages
unpaginated
Publisher
Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
Year
2007
$25.00
ISBN 9780884541141
Publication Date
2007
Publisher
Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
Price
$25.00
"We gratefully acknowledge generous support of the American Center Foundation, the Harpo Foundation and ICA’s Leadership Circle: Jill & Sheldon Bonovitz, Robert Kirkpatrick & John Wind, Meredith & Bryan Verona, Elizabeth A. Asplundh, Floss Barber, Inc., Ellen & Stephen Burbank, Cecile & Christopher J. D’Amelio, Mary & Anthony B. Creamer, III, Barbara & David Farley, Glenn R. Fuhrman, Fury Design, Inc., Suzanne & Jeffrey Koopman, Gabriele W. Lee, Margery P. Lee, The Marketing Audit, Inc., Paul H. Pincus, Leah Popowich & Andrew Hohns, Marguerite Rodgers, Ltd., Alec Rubin & Phillip Chambers, Cindy L. Shaffran & Gary Schwartz, Laura Steinberg Tisch Foundation, Inc., Karen & Howard Weiner, Francis H. Williams and the Wind Foundation.rnrnAdditional funding has been provided by The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, The Dietrich Foundation, Inc., the Overseers Board for the Institute of Contemporary Art, friends and members of ICA, and the University of Pennsylvania."