Ilenia

Attention is a prelude for action. It’s scarce, both as currency and commodity. We consume at a pace as frenetic as that at which we forget, like that thought you started and then failed to write down. It comes out like a chant instead:

The more I make, the more I have, the better I am, the more I am…

R.D. Laing’s words rattle on repeat, casting a mantra across each disrupted panel, the woman-made and machine-made colliding to the point where each forfeits their origin story. Overlaid, disjointed, and distracted. Dennison takes the “blank canvas” and turns it into “blank screen”, the digital footprint and e-comm grid offering structure and order. In a world where everything unfurls without consequences, constraint can be comforting. Under the weight of a steel-toed boot, the one you haven’t purchased yet, you can click away infinitely, but there’s only so many options. Touchscreens rendered computer mouses mostly obsolete, though the target of our longing remains un-evolved, still evading any tactile grip.

In this realm of binds, vibrant, saturated chroma and sweeping gestural strokes proclaim the paintings into being. Squeegee strokes erase and pool paint, while other surfaces emerge as an aftermath: the damning evidence that a painting happened somewhere, elsewhere. The silhouettes of models emerge, repeated, rendered in a blue not quite Yves-Klein. There has been no body contact here. The sensuality isn’t what is touched, it’s the frantic chase, the next big buy.

Flowers, the emblem of natural beauty, are a perineal symbol—within Dennison’s works and within history of humans, timeless tokens of admiration, a codified language of fondness and yearning. Some theorize the attraction to flowers sparked long ago with our ancestors, the blooms offering a prediction of which plant would turn into food during the season to follow. Desire and consumption form a series of endless knots all their own.

Dennison’s petals of choice belong to Jacob’s Ladder flowers, named for a Biblical verse:

And he dreamed,

And behold, a
ladder set up
on the Earth

and its top reached
heaven

and behold, messengers
of God ascending and
descending on it.

Ascend and descend, up and down, down and up. The infinite scroll. The blossoms vibrate sensually in pinks and purples, occasionally a tinge of earthy brown, a little groundedness, scattered with cutouts like peepholes. If we look through them, we end up looking at ourselves. Behold: squinting with one eye shut, another knot by Laing comes to mind:

I never get what I want

I never want what I get

I get what I deserve

– Sabrina Tamar

Violet Dennison (b.1989, Bridgeport, CT) lives and works in New York. The artist has exhibited internationally, with solo presentations including: Wetware, Jan Kaps, Cologne (2023); Freak Like Me, Theta, New York (2021); Disappointment: Chapter Four, Kunstverein Freiburg, (2019); Tell Me How To Feel, Kunsthalle Stavanger, Stavanger (2019); Transcend, Jan Kaps, Cologne (2017); O Earth, O Earth, Return !, Allen & Eldridge, New York (2015) and Replicant, Jan Kaps, Cologne (2014). Recent group presentations include:  Plastic Stars, Tara Downs Gallery, New York (2023); Wishing Well, Parker Gallery, Los Angeles (2023); In Practice: Literally means collapse, Sculpture Center, New York (2022) The Grid and the Curve, JTT, New York (2022); The Patriot, O’Flaugherty’s, New York (2022); So many Stars, Stars, Los Angeles (2021); Some of the Hole, Simian, Copenhagen Focus Group II, Von Ammon Co, Washington (2020); Weather Report, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut (2019); Solar Anus, Parisian Laundry, Montreal (2019); Schau 5, Kunsthaus Kollitsch, Klagenfurt Triennial: Songs for Sabotage, New Museum, New York  (2018); Abracadabra: Main Project, 6th Moscow International Biennial, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (2018); FOAF Berlin, ChertLüdde, Berlin (2018) and Dinner that Night (organised by Weston Lowe), Bureau, New York (2018).