TRISHA DONNELLY SURVEY AT ICA

Monday, 24 December 2007 00:01

PHILADELPHIA, PA - The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) is pleased to present the first survey exhibition of Trisha Donnelly’s work, and her first solo museum exhibition in the U.S, on view January 18 – August 3, 2008. Using sculpture, drawing, photographs, text, sound, video, and painting, Donnelly will compose a new installation in the second floor gallery with works made between 1998 and 2007. Over the course of the installation works will shift and change.

Donnelly’s ineffable body of work resists simple characterization. A lexicon of imagery and action relies on the power of suggestion: what is the most economical gesture that can evoke thoughts of, for example, Napoleonic Wars? How can sound create form? Can a word plant the artist in our conscious? These gestures are catalysts, and this is the gist of Donnelly’s work. Uniting her work in various media are gestures of altered time, shifters, dimensional explorations, evocation, perception, and belief structures.

Time is crucial to her work: a drawing may ask us to slow down, a sound piece may stretch a phrase interminably, a video presents an action in slow motion, a photograph freezes a turn of the torso. The pause allows for shifts in time, both in the present, and in its call to historical shifters—moments in history when “history was written.” Time collapses. The organization of this exhibition asks the artist herself to pause and look back at several years of work.

Donnelly is a San Francisco-based artist (b. 1974, San Francisco). Her work is well known in the contemporary art world, but is still seldom seen outside highly defined contexts. As most of her major exhibitions have occurred in Europe, this exhibition allows viewers who have not experienced firsthand much of her work to see it for the first time. And seeing this work firsthand is crucial to the questions Donnelly’s work pursues. The work requires your presence.

Since completing her MFA at Yale in 2000, Donnelly has had solo projects at Modern Art Oxford (2007), Portikus, Frankfurt am Main (2006), Kunsthalle Zurich (2005), Kolnischer Kunstverein (2005), and ArtPace, San Antonio (2005). She has been included in numerous group exhibitions: “Uncertain States of America,” Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo (traveled) (2005); “Day for Night,” 2006 Whitney Biennial, New York; “Of Mice + Men: 4th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art,” Berlin (2006); and 54th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2004). She teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute and is a visiting critic at Yale. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Carnegie Museum, Walker Art Center, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Tate Modern, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo, among others.

This exhibition is organized by Associate Curator Jenelle Porter and is accompanied by a catalog publication documenting the installation and will be available after the exhibition opens.

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART ( ICA )
Founded in 1963, the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania is a leader in the presentation and documentation of contemporary art. Through exhibitions, commissions, educational programs, and publications, ICA invites the public to share in the experience, interpretation and understanding of the work of established and emerging artists. For more information, call 215-898-7108/5911, or visit www.icaphila.org