SOLITUDE
Artists:
Jessica Dessner, Lily Gibeon and Sean Sullivan
We are in unprecedented times for our generation, which makes it very easy to find ourselves yearning for places and ways of life that now feel incredibly distant. As we’ve been forced into physical lockdown, we must now process the spacial and temporal distance from our jobs, daily routines, friends and loved ones. SOLITUDE, Shrine’s second digital exhibition mounted during COVID-19, presents three artists who explore uninhabited spaces, solitary figures and personal histories in their work. While evoking a vintage atmosphere, these artists also provide us a glimpse into a new future, where looking backwards may help us move forward.
Jessica Dessner is an American visual artist, poet, dancer and choreographer, who after 25 years living in New York City relocated to the Piedmont region of Italy with her family in 2016. In a new series of highly-detailed colored pencil drawings, Dessner focuses on the workshops of local Italian craftsmen that she discovered while rehabilitating an old farmhouse near Mombarcaro. These old-school workshops are incredibly vital to the local economy and also provide a visual metaphor for a simpler way of life, where entire families live and die in the same small towns and villages as their ancestors. Soon after moving abroad, Dessner learned that she had breast cancer, which was made all the more traumatic as she was in a country she barely knew. As a means of coping, she decided to create watercolor paintings depicting single trees as a daily meditation. By focusing on the trees’ mutability and resilience, they became role models for her own healing and restoration. Both distinct bodies of work pay homage and reflect on the comfort of enduring objects and establishments.
Early photography and musical recordings conceptually inform the art practice of Sean Sullivan, who lives and works in Hudson Valley, NY. These now outdated modes of documenting images and sounds captured both the creators’ intentions as well as the errant details and unpredictability of the atmospheric conditions in which they were made. Sullivan’s swift and simple process seeks to engage the same level of chance. First drawn with ballpoint pen using a ruler and carbon paper, the images are then transferred onto found paper with oil paint. This process not only captures the intended lines of Sullivan’s initial drawing but also leaves record of the accidental marks and unique variations from the transfer. The final images reference geometric designs, deconstructed gardens, and lone storefronts, all of which impart an antique and art deco visual quality while still feeling otherworldly and mysterious.
Lily Gibeon was a patient at Friern Hospital, a large-scale psychiatric asylum outside of London, sometime during the 1940s and 1950s. The lead psychiatrist at the facility during Gibeon’s stay, Dr. A.C. Dalzell, developed strong ideas about the possibility of highly unique artistic expression from institutionalized individuals after reading Hans Prinzhorn’s 1922 book, The Artistry of the Mentally Ill. Prinzhorn’s explorations of the links between mental illness, creativity, and art inspired Dalzell to collect and save his own patients’ creations for use as teaching tools and to advocate for other hospitals to allow their patients to create art. The most detailed account of Lily Gibeon comes from a transcription by Dalzell on the backside of one of her works: “Severe schizophrenia– her paintings nearly always portray herself. Though quiet and colorless herself, her paintings are full of color, and force, and are done at great speed." Gibeon’s whimsical images often feature cats with human-like grins (many times with other cats inside of them) and what we must assume to be self portraits depicting Gibeon surrounded by flowers, other versions of herself and idilic houses. Perhaps these are expressions of what she most yearned for outside the walls of the institution: a home, the natural world and a pet to love.