Moment to Moment

The centerpiece of Violet Dennison’s new show, “Damaged Self,” at Tara Downs in New York is a painting of a purple flower, a “pop silhouette” of a Jacob’s ladder wildflower, to be specific. The artist is well aware that the color corresponds with her own first name, confirming as much with a slight nod and smile. (It’s echoed again in the title, Jacob’s Ladder Flower in Violet, 2024.) “There’s always some sort of language tied to my work,” Dennison explains. She was drawn to the Biblical and spiritual connotations of the plant’s name, too; coincidentally, she’d found herself in something of a Biblical situation the day after she’d discovered the flower near her boyfriend’s family’s house in California, when a raging wildfire passed in the vicinity. 

Narratives aside, the core concept of “Damaged Self” is abstraction, Dennison, 35, stresses. Even as she riffs on representative motifs including but not limited to the wildflower, her 15 new works are awash with broad, expressive strokes. All were executed in her studio with squeegees and paintbrushes, leaving an effect in the lineage of Abstract Expressionism but with a uniquely Dennison touch, as the artist combines her eye for composition with in-the-moment instinct for layering color and texture. Previous bodies of her work have taken form as abstract sculptures and installations, and she’s put a great deal of thought into the process as she’s turned her attention to the canvas. “There’s something about painting in general, particularly abstraction, it’s very hard to talk about and hard to write about,” she says. “I think that's what draws me into it, that it is this subjective visual experience.” Unmissable are a trio of monochrome paintings, Burnt Out! Green 1-3, 2024, that take up lime-green pigment applied in sweeping gestures, forming dimensional knots, flat sheets, and dark speckles out of the single hue. Nearby, several “Tilt” paintings delve into geometric abstraction as each features a multi-colored rectangle superimposed at an angle within the physical canvas, leaving neutral-toned patches around the edges. “It’s a painting of an unstretched painting,” Dennison explains. “I’m approaching the painting in a systematic way: ‘I’m tilting it,’ ‘I’m erasing it.’”

Another figurative motif—and a personal favorite of mine—manifests in a white, filmstrip-like configuration that bisects the abstractions in two paintings, and on which appears silhouettes of clothed figures, shoes and bags; the imagery is derived from screenshots from the e-commerce site SSENSE, of product listings from the cool-kid brand Kiko Kostadinov. “It’s insane how quickly we can recognize this thing as the shopping grid, and we’re so immersed in that,” she says. She also connects the endless scrolling inherent to online shopping to the ephemerality of flowers: “There's always a gap between what we can have. And we're never going to be satisfied, right? We're always pushing for something else.”

Further speculating on the meeting of abstraction and lived experience in the work, Dennison reasons: “The most basic concept is just painting my feelings,” she says. “I’m obsessed with this idea of making painting feel now, or current. I think that’s why I'm really drawn to these moments in the contemporary space of inattention, distraction, disruption. I try to let those feelings lead me, and fall into it more.”

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“Damaged Self” is on view through October, 5, 2024 at Tara Downs at 424 Broadway Floor 3, New York, NY 10013.