The Last Wilderness

Cecilia Danell

2 June — 16 August 2017

About the Artist(s)

Cecilia Danell (b.1985) is a Swedish artist based in Galway, Ireland since 2004. While regarding painting as her main medium, her work is multifaceted and also utilises film and installation. Through her own encounters with the Scandinavian landscape, she explores the theatricality of places that become imbued with artifice, as they can’t live up to the human need for that which is primal, wild and untouched. Her current body of paintings is based on walks in the area surrounding her family farm in Sweden, where the experience of being in the landscape influences the paintings beyond the photographic source material. Danell details each walk through maps, photographs and notes in her journal, but once in the studio, the quality of oil paint and the hands on process of making become as important to her as the initial source material. She walks and traces an environment that she knows intimately, happening upon decaying remnants of human activity, further upending the romantic notion of nature as untended wilderness. Danell’s work always pulls the viewer back to the fact that what she's presenting is a construct. The painted landscape is melting, ocular glitches of unnatural colour present themselves as part of the scenery. She has previously used the theatre as metaphor for constructed reality by presenting objects with the surreal quality of being made in the likeness of something, yet falling short of true semblance. Her 2017 film 'Tonight at the Magic Theatre' expanded on this further by mixing footage of a Swedish provincial theatre with footage of theatre props moving about in the landscape. Theatre sets were further referenced through the making of a large-scale forest installation from laser cut plywood which complimented the film piece in the gallery.

"In a post-nature future the unconscious mind will be the last wilderness."

This solo exhibition was an expansion of Cecilia Danell’s show at Galway City Arts Centre in March 2017. For the show at The Dock we re-contextualised Danell’s stunning paintings of Scandinavian landscapes by making references to her interests in film, theatre and performance. Presented in association with Galway Arts Centre

Many of the paintings made reference to her native Sweden and were developed during a residency in Norway. The exhibition incorporated an experimental film piece, shot on Super 8 film in the forest landscape at Bona, County Östergötland and The Old Theatre in the town Vadstena near where Danell is originally from. The film was screened from a small theatre set constructed of plywood forest. The works played between ideas of realism and artifice. Danell explored the relationship between cinema and dream and in how the landscape can act as a metaphorical stage set for the human psyche. She sought to investigate the correlation between landscape, staged realities and the theatre.

As part of the exhibition preview an evening of music took place with Cecilia Danell’s performing as A Lilac Decline with her fellow musicians Phantom Dog Beneath The Moon and Loner Deluxe from micro-independent Galway label Rusted Rail.

The Last Wilderness

Cecilia Danell

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Cecilia Danell

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The Last Wilderness, Cecilia Danell

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The Last Wilderness, Cecilia Danell

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