Cynthia Daignault

White Columns is pleased to present a solo exhibition in our main gallery and lobby spaces by the New York-based artist Cynthia Daignault.

For her exhibition at White Columns Daignault will present a group of recent paintings created specifically for the space. Daignault’s paintings consider various formal tropes relating to the display and reception of art, and in particular to the presentation of film, video, and projection works in white-cube gallery spaces. (The works self-reflexively acknowledge that making paintings about such ideas is a fundamentally paradoxical activity.)

Daignault’s paintings, or visual tautologies, are rendered in a not-quite photo-realistic manner – akin to that of, say, Vija Celmins or Luc Tuymans. They include depictions of analogue and digital projection equipment (e.g. slide projectors, overhead projectors, video projectors, etc.) that are paired with painted representations of their projected images. For example a painting of an overhead projector is paired with a painted image of a projected text taken from Beckett’s ‘Molloy’. These paired canvases, installed in direct formal relationship to one another, establish plausible but unstable illusions.

Daignault’s paintings amplify the sense of artifice inherent not only in the presentation of art but also with regard to painting’s own slippery relationship with reality itself. In other works, such as her painted takes on iconic modernist furniture – of the kind still to be found in certain gallery and museum settings – Daignault amplifies, and gently subverts the aesthetic codes and social hierarchies associated with these universal symbols of good taste.

Taking the potential of mimicry to its logical conclusion Daignault has painted, to scale, a version of White Columns’ ‘Bulletin Board’ project space. Daignault’s painted version has temporarily displaced the actual bulletin board that is usually to be found in the gallery’s lobby area, creating in turn a kind of aesthetic ‘double-take’ that plays on the visitor’s own relationship with White Columns’ history and its programs.

Cynthia Daignault is an artist, musician and writer who lives and works in New York. She received a BA from Stanford University in 2001 and a Post Baccalaureate degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004. Her work has been exhibited at various venues including Plane Space, New York, and Glen Horowitz, East Hampton, among others. She received a MacDowell Colony Fellowship in 2010.

For her White Columns exhibition Daignault has produced a 12” x 16” painting of a CCTV monitor in a series/edition of thirty unique examples. Each painting will depict a scene to be determined by the purchaser and the artist. The example on view depicts the street scene outside White Columns’ front door. For more information, and pricing, please contact the gallery.

For further information about this project, contact: info@whitecolumns.org