Despite being so often deemed a Conceptual artist, Trisha Donnelly is notorious for her disinclination to provide viewers with any hermeneutic parameters for navigating her work. As always, there is no press release or checklist available at this solo show, and the art itself is implacably taciturn and unamenable to imposed interpretations. Nevertheless, it undeniably commands attention, and viewers are left to encounter it with the recourse of little else other than their senses.
The exhibition comprises four marble sculptures (all Untitled, 2023) somewhat reminiscent of Donnelly’s previous stone monoliths, although geometrically precise in a manner far more architectural. The visitor’s passage through the show is determined both by the layout of the gallery and the sequencing of the 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 once. Yet even from this perspective, both sculptures seem to stake an exclusive claim on the viewer’s gaze.
The first sculpture is gray and upright, a stout slab with fine lines carved into its convex front side and gouged sections elsewhere. The second is similar, though taller, with more severely chiseled fissures whose crimson complexion inescapably evokes open wounds. The fourth piece is also upright, but it is far thinner and eschews the interplay of technological exactitude and physical distress in favor of an oaky finish. The third and most arresting artwork is a long, narrow form that lies horizontally on the floor and terminates in a rough nub of unpolished marble. It paradoxically recalls fragments of both sci-fi artillery and classical ruins. In this sense, it typifies the way in which all of the pieces are imbued with an indeterminant temporality, as if missives from both the distant past and the future.