Soundings

Donna Dennis is an American sculptor, painter, printmaker and writer. She is one of a small group of groundbreaking women, including Alice Aycock, Jackie Ferrara, Alice Adams and Mary Miss, who pushed sculpture toward the domain of architecture in the early 1970s, a sensibility that has been called the Architectural Sculpture movement.  The artist finds beauty in places shaped by ordinary people, which become repositories for memory and feelings. Her seemingly familiar yet often darkly mysterious sites evoke memories, encourage reflection and allude to the transient nature of life.  Drawing from overlooked fragments of rural and urban vernacular American architecture, her hand-crafted sculptures – tourist cabins, hotels, subway stations, roller coasters – have represented stopping places on the journey through life.  Her bold, life size installations of scaled down urban structures – often with sound – stand in for the human presence.  Her subject is not pure architecture or sculpture but portals to a metaphorical journey through life.

The artist has noted about the present work:

When I moved to the Hudson Valley in 2019, after 54 years in New York City, I knew it would be a monumental change. I arrived in New York when I was 23 and burning with desire to be a painter. Then, at 77, I was leaving the city of my dreams, with some regret, to make a life in the country.

As a young artist, transitioning from painting to installation sculpture, I loved staying up late, working into the wee hours in my studio in The City That Never Sleeps. I was inspired by the dark, gritty subways, bridges and tunnels linking the city to the larger world. Now, in my studio  – a former woodworker’s shop – I was looking across a green lawn at my new house as night quietly fell. I wondered what kind of artist I was going to be now. I got out my watercolors and began to paint my house as I saw it from the studio. In the late summer and early fall of 2019, I completed more than thirty of these sketches. It didn’t take long for me to move the house from the center of the painting off to the side, so that the focus was on the trees, the sky, the stretch of lawn. As the days grew shorter and I continued working I allowed myself to begin to imagine more of the night sky, while keeping a sliver of the house in view.

It felt natural to move from watercolors to diorama boxes in the spring of 2020. I had made dioramas before as works in themselves but also as studies for possible installations. As I made the new dioramas, I began to find my way, integrating the artist I had been with the artist I would become. The house in the dioramas I came to see as me, looking at my new world.

This new print, Soundings, my first photogravure, takes its imagery from the third of the dioramas I made. I worked on that diorama during the first Spring of my new life in the country. As the world around me came alive, I was surprised and deeply moved by the power of the sounds that rose up from the marshes and out of the woods as night fell. Charles Burchfield and Joseph Cornell were in mind when I added the small white banner with concentric circles as my way of honoring the beauty of the song that filled my night.