Forensics of the Interior
Cecilia Bien
Trisha Donnelly, hedm!, 2005, courtesy of the Linda Pace Foundation Collection, Ruby City, San Antonio, Texas
The exhibition at The Drawing Center is untitled or presumably eponymous. The absence of a press release or research-based required reading leaves one empty-handed with nothing to rely on for navigation outside of the self. In fact, the only text provided is in counterpart to the exhibition rather than in direct correlation to it. On the wall of the exhibition’s entrance, in adhesive vinyl lettering, there is a proverb from the Taoist grand master, Lao Xi:
While Lao Xi translates to “teacher” in Mandarin, these words contain little to no trace of didacticism. Here, the gift—and relief—of the esoteric is that viewers must find their own relationship to the whim and infatuation of the nonsensical. With only a fifth century BC Chinese philosopher as a linguistic reference point, Donnelly’s work might therefore be described as opaque, enigmatic, hard to crack. But there are cracks nevertheless, where a fragility in the drawings is tangible, where negative spaces appear as fissures on the brink of erupting. With nothing to mistheorize, there’s an allowance for free association without the fear of being wrong. Yet, it is exactly this freedom that makes looking at Donnelly’s work at times feel so challenging. The freedom to continuously find new contexts in which to engage with these drawings suggests that no interpretation can provide a fixed answer, that to commit to remaining flexible in adjusting one’s perspective is an ongoing practice in itself—oftentimes of the most difficult kind. After all, Taoism advises movement with the flow, embodying a process of transformation which underlies a common notion of reality, in knowing which moments call for resistance and which call for surrender. Thus there is an embedded receptivity in the drawings, reflecting a vulnerable strength through the openness to being misunderstood, with a trust in the viewer to find meaning by sitting with the ephemeral.
Trisha Donnelly’s works in this exhibition do not aim to grasp at any kind of politics or sociology, or a feigned guidance through explanations, disclaimers, excuses, refuses, or aspirations for the avant-garde. The eternal question of whether art needs theory and if theory is not art returns. The drawings suggest that a new language might be formed around them, as a precondition for anything that might later be theorized as a response.
In the main exhibition room of The Drawing Center, the drawings are displayed behind adjacent glass panels approximately A4 in size, installed mostly at a standard eye-level around the perimeter. While perception differs depending on the viewer’s height, anyone might be challenged by what to see nevertheless. Cartilage and tendons, bone marrow squeezed from the edges of form, carved and shaped like tools, some version of taxidermy is abstracted while shivers vibrate from loose joints. A slice of what seems to be a former marble column rests reliably like a bench, also orchestrating a changing perception based on where and how we position ourselves as viewers. A poster-sized print of something like an object imitating the moon hangs in another alcove, next to a drawing similar in size. There is a slightly more completed quality here than in the smaller drawings within the main space, as if the artist had envisioned this image long before it became a drawing. The pencil strokes are fine, and one might imagine it as a sliver of mahogany wood sanded down to be smooth as stone, bent and warped into a shape that could be a chair, hair, or a helmet with perforations as if the shape itself has been torn out of a spiral-bound notebook. It also looks a little like a decaying leaf with its aged holes, fallen at the precipice of a season changing, an inscrutable winter light forming a radiance around its edges. This is the kind of unknown that at once emphasizes its own strangeness and the desire to behold it. What appears to be a gaping orifice at the bottom of the bizarre structure hints that there must be an interior, albeit one that will never be known.
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In writing about these drawings, I am aware of my inadvertent self-projection into the artist’s practice as a method for forming an interpretation of someone else’s idiosyncrasies. The crude and gentle lines (Is that 10B graphite? What does it matter?) in some of the drawings elicit the diary-keeper in me. I can't help but feel the familiar impulse verging on compulsion which arrives with the flow of expressing oneself to only oneself. In finding one’s own relationship to different versions of themselves through language, ruminations become an internal discourse. Donnelly has said in an interview, “When I’m drawing, I just wait a really long time because I have to do the right thing. So I don’t draw all day, but when I have the thing I am supposed to be drawing, I draw all day and all night.”1
The attractiveness and resonance of these drawings is in the artist’s limitations, dictated at once by an inner letting go and restraint in equal measure. They possess a formal intuition of when to start and when to stop. Yet unlike diary-writing, the works will be shown to an audience at some point, and thus the distance between an artist’s interiority and what is legible to the artist’s audience—I would imagine—is negotiated as part of the practice’s strangeness. Which parts does one reveal while remaining open to however they may be seen? The introspective process of articulating this relationship requires self-awareness, and a generosity in the offer of itself to an audience, an exchange of recognition.
I begin to understand these drawings as records of a selective memory reflecting what Donnelly wishes to communicate outside of the self. In several works, pencil and pen have the double function of mediums beyond the apparatus and into the occult sense. They’re translating between the unknown, relaying something paranormal though finely-tuned messages onto paper. Here, no quality of paper appears to be privileged, lending whatever rough, smooth, gridded, translucent, or tinted surface quirks it contains to the drawn entries. Curatorial efforts to frame the drawings as extraterrestrial-adjacent are evident via a parallel exhibition Voice of Space: UFO and Paranormal Phenomena which includes a few of Donnelly’s works. Yet using this concept as a conduit for accessibility only makes visible its limitations. All the volatile forms of imagination and desire get lost when they are named or assigned a role. Why can’t a ribbon-sutured sack be constructed from the heart’s muscles, splintered with an icicle, and pierced through the bottom?
In an alcove on the left side of the gallery upon entering, a negative of what could be the inside of a car trunk or a microscopic close-up of an organism is projected toward the bottom of a pencil drawing that looks like the outline of a ballpoint pen. As with the paper sources integrated into the drawing, the energy currents within the technical facets of the camera—or the scanner that Donnelly sometimes uses as camera2—also contribute to the image, alluding to activity only visible by photograph, yet which would otherwise be unseen in “real life.”3 From the artist’s recent lecture at the Art Center in Los Angeles, it is apparent that she works diligently with negatives from the photos she takes of everything. As I understand it, this serial use of negatives operates as negation of a lens-based practice, and therefore its framing as an undoing of the known—inverting a relationship to what the artist has referred to as “real life.” Here, interiority becomes forensic, deadpan in its openness.
I realize that by looking at the drawings, I have reconfigured a perception that makes me feel as if I’ve only previously seen refractions. Up and down the river near my apartment, I look at the weathered tree trunks separated from their bases, cut neatly by nature and exposing their core––what inevitably will become driftwood in the not so distant future. Raw pieces remain intact, but what is more visible are the harsh and soft elements with which they have been touched. My mind has drifted and for a moment, I experience the day through new eyes. With these drawings now imprinted in my visual memory and with no vocabulary to attach to them, every prediscursive form is one to feel through and reconsider in its natural shape. The way something is born, or how it breathes before it nearly dies. At first, the drawings from the show appear to demand nothing until they suddenly impose on the faculties where even the cynical must engage with fantasy. These dire times are ones in which we might want an explanation for and from everything, including art, to provide (or provoke?) a certainty or security of what we are looking at and how to understand it. Yet this exhibition exposes the accidents that affirm the impossibility of connecting all the dots through meaning, much less through words that pretend to do so.
Trisha Donnelly, Untitled (Drawing Through the Wall) 2004, Private Collection
2. Donnelly, Trisha. Art Center Graduate Art Seminar. 15 April 2025. Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA.
3. Ibid.