Violet Dennison

The exhibition is Dennison’s first presentation of a series of luminous single and multi-paneled oil paintings oscillating between digitally enlarged and fragmented Jacob’s Ladder flowers and abstract gestures. The series expands and builds on her conceptual practice.

Known for her system-based abstractions, Dennison has previously installed networks of water pipes and used seagrass as an artistic material. She runs interference on these systems and hacks or breaks them. In the same vein, the artist interrupts the compositions of her paintings with brush marks, energetic RGB colors and the recurring watermark “A”. Some of her strokes end abruptly like breaking waves, mimicking the digital freneticism, the incessant swiping and scrolling of our time. All this interference forms clouds of noise: repeating offbeat patterns, echoing the hiccups and disruptions that permeate industrial life.

More than that, her paintings function as systems and are part of them: digital screens, stroke economies and garbled information. Her diluted oil paints barely seep into the non-absorbent canvases and the abstract flower-like shapes resemble macro shots of artificial sexual organs. The paintings combine organic memories and digital fantasy mutations. The image of Jacob’s ladder, the bridge between earth and heaven, materializes the metaphor of the jumbled bond between the physical and metaphysical: the interconnected tapestry that shapes contemporary existence, ever-shifting between techno and nature. Rejecting pretense and disguise, these transparent paintings return to a sensuous immediacy.

Like a misinterpreted Morse code, the flickering of these images indicates the ongoing gain and loss of a connection.