ON ENTROPY
The impulse to portray our surroundings is rooted in the very beginning of noesis, and nestled deep within caves across the world. The powerful imagery of these early narrators still compels us, in gestures of red ochre and black charcoal on an interior vertical plane. These stories referenced and located people’s time and their place in the world, describing the experience of living in it, while marking the temporality of life, dislocation, and the liminal space of both known, and unknown, journeys. This is very core of storytelling and the history of people.
Danielson’s storytelling employs methods of cartography and documentation, captures footfalls, considers the travels of people before and after her, and sorts the chaos of a city into a comprehensible form or landscape. Woven throughout is the idea there can be no order without disorder, entropy, or dischordance. Contending with the reality of disarray can only be achieved by relinquishing control and embracing the paradox of holding fixed ideas of what organization should be. It also means inviting chance and random generation. How this relates to Danielson’s newest work is, more than ever, understanding a toggling between the visible, knowable map and an open, fluctuating pattern.
For Intangible Horizon, Danielson illustrates these ideas through a lush offering of deep, rich color. She layers her materials in variegated pattern and calligraphic forms using acrylic paint, ink, marker, and graphite; and collaged paper onto which she has painted, drawn, or printed. Though some works feel almost effortless, gestural, and free; they’re each the result of a deliberate, methodical, and taxing effort to employ a series of specific, dedicated choices. These choices themselves describe a journey of deep connection to place through work created over a period of time before, during, and after a series of residencies in the past year.
At the beginning of this series, Danielson references the surroundings of her city, and the gesture of the paint reflects a chaotically frenetic, tightly coiled, dark energy. Over the course of her time traveling across the continental US, the energy becomes brighter, looser, and unfurled. What appears is a different kind of mapping, less about traversing a distance and more about comprehending the overall structure. What is the architecture of a forest, versus the architecture of a city? Through Danielson’s work, these complexities intertwine to describe the discomforting notion there are worlds both infinitely bigger, and infinitely smaller, than our own. At certain points, the aesthetics of each are startlingly similar-- is this painting zooming out, or zooming in? The binding thread across scale is the impact of time, entropy, and place.
Cities relentlessly invigorate, ramp up, tear down, churn onward. In contemplating the broad view, of taking it all in, or being inundated with the unending stimulus of everyday urban life; Danielson’s paintings Molecular Stew and Particulates are chaotic, dirty, and crazed. Peeled skins of globular paint fall upon layers of collaged paper and tangled line to accumulate like the history of siding on a building, or pavement beneath our feet. In Findings, calligraphic marks and bright triangular shapes dance across the surface like so much text from signs, storefronts, billboards, graffiti walls, and newsstands. The close magnification of Intertwistal reveals a hot pink and electric blue diamond grid. The effect feels like a pulse, like bright light shining through the blood vessels of one’s closed eyelids; like neon signs overhead flooding the window; a mashup of overstimulating information escalating into the hyperreal, a syncopation of simulated layers.
Rural residencies provide room, respite, and a place for an artist to breathe. They provide time to slow down, touch the earth, and feel small beneath an expansive sky or canopied forest. To notice the pattern of water in a creek, lake, or river. To observe how the shape of the land is formed. To understand the meaning of layers built from unfathomable stretches of geological time, rather than the abbreviated but stacked layers of human history. The work Sue made during these stretches of time are verdantly blue and green, and open up the edges to reflect the topography. Their patterning mimics dappled light and shadow, such as the golden-green aura beneath a tree, or the quicksilver shimmer of moving water. Relinquishing her control of the map’s direction, Sue shifts the timbre of her strokes to reflect the seemingly randomized but carefully articulated geography and ecology of the land.
These paintings are about time, and they are about place. They are about tethering ourselves to the ground wherever we are, whether that is buried deep within the concrete and glass forests of a city, or the vast rolling hills and groves of arboreal cathedrals. This is just one story of people who fluctuate between catapulting themselves towards an uncertain technological future, alongside a continued desire to connect to the land. Entropy overrules us all. The earth shifts beneath our feet and its mountains rise and fall. We are born, we grow old, we negotiate place, we pass on. This innate need to describe location in our world through painting persists across millennia to continue telling stories in gesture, line, and form far beyond our brief time.
Danielson’s storytelling employs methods of cartography and documentation, captures footfalls, considers the travels of people before and after her, and sorts the chaos of a city into a comprehensible form or landscape. Woven throughout is the idea there can be no order without disorder, entropy, or dischordance. Contending with the reality of disarray can only be achieved by relinquishing control and embracing the paradox of holding fixed ideas of what organization should be. It also means inviting chance and random generation. How this relates to Danielson’s newest work is, more than ever, understanding a toggling between the visible, knowable map and an open, fluctuating pattern.
For Intangible Horizon, Danielson illustrates these ideas through a lush offering of deep, rich color. She layers her materials in variegated pattern and calligraphic forms using acrylic paint, ink, marker, and graphite; and collaged paper onto which she has painted, drawn, or printed. Though some works feel almost effortless, gestural, and free; they’re each the result of a deliberate, methodical, and taxing effort to employ a series of specific, dedicated choices. These choices themselves describe a journey of deep connection to place through work created over a period of time before, during, and after a series of residencies in the past year.
At the beginning of this series, Danielson references the surroundings of her city, and the gesture of the paint reflects a chaotically frenetic, tightly coiled, dark energy. Over the course of her time traveling across the continental US, the energy becomes brighter, looser, and unfurled. What appears is a different kind of mapping, less about traversing a distance and more about comprehending the overall structure. What is the architecture of a forest, versus the architecture of a city? Through Danielson’s work, these complexities intertwine to describe the discomforting notion there are worlds both infinitely bigger, and infinitely smaller, than our own. At certain points, the aesthetics of each are startlingly similar-- is this painting zooming out, or zooming in? The binding thread across scale is the impact of time, entropy, and place.
Cities relentlessly invigorate, ramp up, tear down, churn onward. In contemplating the broad view, of taking it all in, or being inundated with the unending stimulus of everyday urban life; Danielson’s paintings Molecular Stew and Particulates are chaotic, dirty, and crazed. Peeled skins of globular paint fall upon layers of collaged paper and tangled line to accumulate like the history of siding on a building, or pavement beneath our feet. In Findings, calligraphic marks and bright triangular shapes dance across the surface like so much text from signs, storefronts, billboards, graffiti walls, and newsstands. The close magnification of Intertwistal reveals a hot pink and electric blue diamond grid. The effect feels like a pulse, like bright light shining through the blood vessels of one’s closed eyelids; like neon signs overhead flooding the window; a mashup of overstimulating information escalating into the hyperreal, a syncopation of simulated layers.
Rural residencies provide room, respite, and a place for an artist to breathe. They provide time to slow down, touch the earth, and feel small beneath an expansive sky or canopied forest. To notice the pattern of water in a creek, lake, or river. To observe how the shape of the land is formed. To understand the meaning of layers built from unfathomable stretches of geological time, rather than the abbreviated but stacked layers of human history. The work Sue made during these stretches of time are verdantly blue and green, and open up the edges to reflect the topography. Their patterning mimics dappled light and shadow, such as the golden-green aura beneath a tree, or the quicksilver shimmer of moving water. Relinquishing her control of the map’s direction, Sue shifts the timbre of her strokes to reflect the seemingly randomized but carefully articulated geography and ecology of the land.
These paintings are about time, and they are about place. They are about tethering ourselves to the ground wherever we are, whether that is buried deep within the concrete and glass forests of a city, or the vast rolling hills and groves of arboreal cathedrals. This is just one story of people who fluctuate between catapulting themselves towards an uncertain technological future, alongside a continued desire to connect to the land. Entropy overrules us all. The earth shifts beneath our feet and its mountains rise and fall. We are born, we grow old, we negotiate place, we pass on. This innate need to describe location in our world through painting persists across millennia to continue telling stories in gesture, line, and form far beyond our brief time.
