ArtSeen
Dannielle Tegeder
Death Rock City
Priska C. Juschka
Dannielle Tegeder’s art has very long titles. Fantastic indices referencing made-up lands, they are awkward and cumbersome fragments that refute punctuation, capitalization, and grammatical order. As an example, a title from one of her most recent mixed-media drawings:
"BaskraPataci (India – Iran): Tri-Level Schematic with Long Escape Routes; Safety Chrysalis into Yellow Lower Level Station, and Upper Level Tower with Tri-station Containing Hollow Safety Igloo and Winter Line Trees, Upper Mandala and Triangle Forest with Oval Garden, Electric and Water Tower with Nuclear Route Ellipse; Schematic and Yellow Excavation Safety Areas; and Miniature Oz City and Grio Planet with Secret Square Gardens and Circle Floating Shelters" (2004).
In this paragraphical nomenclature, independent nations align to form new lands that are prepared to defend against the forces of evil rampant in our post-cold war, terrorized world. Tegeder mixes and matches her references, employing protective shelters and stages from the natural world (igloos and chrysalides), the fiction world (Oz and the Secret Garden), and the world of religious iconography (mandala), before returning back again to the real world of escape routes, towers, and stations. The result is a dizzying mental image of layered chaos and complex structure—paradoxically, not what is found in her precisely rendered works.
Using a lexicon of geometric forms, Tegeder weaves together lozenges, circles, squares, hash marks, triangles, and lines into diagrammatic compositions. All the drawings in Death Rock City are systematic abstractions that evoke a language of architectural drafting, technological plans, or schematic plan (as in the London tube map). She employs a palette that ranges from black, through gray, to white, as well as ochre, pale brown, and a variety of yellow, and there is little obvious difference between the works beyond their color, a uniformity that does the disservice of making the works feel decorative. Similarly, the scale of the pieces, which is determined by the number of sheets of Fabriano Murillo paper she has used (either one or four), amplifies this sense of patterned repetition, for the character of the compositions does not change with scale; it merely grows. While in some work repetition is essential—as in Warhol’s grids or Gordon Matta-Clark’s wallpaper projects—Tegeder’s urban landscapes cry out for moments of explosive tension. Charles Sheeler and Bernd and Hilla Becher also come to mind, but the power of their industrial landscapes derives from the intense energy channeling through, in steam pipes and electricity lines. That it is contained and controlled by an industrial armature, and then silently rendered, is simultaneously beautiful and terrifying. In Tegeder’s work, the potential for a kind of terrific science-fiction landscape exists but does not come fully into itself.
However, moments of extraordinary potential abound, as do lovely microcosmic environments. For instance, there are places where Tegeder loosens her grip and watery gouache appears to billow like uncontained smoke; or places where a channel or tunnel made of minute concentric circles feels like tiny Albers color studies put to work. In addition, Tegeder’s first foray into translating her cities into three dimensions is successful. Perched atop mirror-topped boxes of varying heights, she re-creates her two-dimensional language using a litany of found objects—beads, pigment, plastic tubing, sequins, wooden blocks, even sea glass, a choice I especially like for the contrast offered by the imperfections of each piece. Particularly strong is her decision to link the sculpture into the physical space of the gallery through a long beaded thread that disappears into a silver heating vent. The exposed electrical innards and the concrete gallery floor, itself striated through years of industrial use, become connected to the landscape of her built environment. This draws out the ignored spaces of the room and moves the sculpture stylistically away from what I suspect is an unintentional linkage to the work of the similarly architectonic and mirrored environments of David Altmejd and closer to the extraordinary fantasy-scapes of Sarah Sze.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
three
By Juan Arabia, translated by Patricio FerrariDEC 22–JAN 23 | Poetry
Juan Arabia is a poet, translator and literary critic. Born in Buenos Aires in 1983, he is founder and director of the cultural and literary project Buenos Aires Poetry. Arabia is also in-house literary critic for the Cultural Supplement of Diario Perfil and Revista Ñ of Diario Clarín. Among his most recent poetry titles are Desalojo de la Naturaleza [Eviction of Nature] (Buenos Aires Poetry, 2018), Hacia Carcassonne [Towards Carcassonne] (Pre-Textos, 2021), and Bulmenia (Buenos Aires Poetry, 2022). After the publication of El enemigo de los Thirsties [Enemy of the Thirties] (2015), awarded in France, Italy, and Macedonia, Juan participated in several poetry festivals in Latin America, Europe, and China. In 2018, on behalf of Argentina, he was invited to the Voix vives de Méditerranée en Méditerranée poetry festival in Sète (France). The following year he became the second Latin American poet to be invited to the Poetry Comes to Museum LXI, sponsored by the Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum. Arabia has translated works by Ezra Pound, Arthur Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas, and Dan Fante, among others. Two of his books have been translated into French (LOcéan Avare, trad. Jean Portante, Al Manar, 2018) and Italian (Verso Carcassonne, trad. Mattia Tarantino, Raffaelli Editore, 2022). He lives in San Telmo (Buenos Aires) with his wife the designer, poet, and literary translator Camila Evia and son Cátulo.

Discovering Duchamp through the Fourth Dimension in 1971
By Linda Dalrymple HendersonOCT 2022 | Critics Page
In 1970 the Stedelijk Museums first major Kazimir Malevich exhibition had revealed his use of Fourth Dimension in his titles. And, most importantly, there was a clue in the entry for Duchamps 1920 Rotary Glass Plates in the 1968 catalog of the MOMA exhibition The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age.
Suzanne Jackson with Lilly Wei
OCT 2022 | Art
On the occasion of her solo exhibition, Listen N Home, at the Chicago Arts Club Suzanne Jackson spoke to Lilly Wei about her process of layering, the importance of titles, and the role history plays in her work and life.
18. 1988/2019 and various times in between, England
By Raphael RubinsteinSEPT 2022 | The Miraculous
Asked by a music writer at what point did he realize his band was going to be a success, a singer songwriter says that he knew instantly. "There were lots and lots of people ready to identify with what I was feeling. Hatred! Hating everything, but not being offensively hateful (chuckle). It was like hate from quite gentle people." After the band breaks up, he titles his first solo album Viva Hate. At first this seems like an extension of his famously combative personality, but in the years that follow, as he makes frequent anti-immigrant remarks, repeatedly criticizes those who speak out against sexual harassment in the entertainment industry and, during a performance on the Tonight Show, sports the logo of a notorious far-right political party, more and more of his fans (or, as they now have to think of themselves, ex-fans) conclude that the kind of hate he espouses has morphed from post-adolescent angst into pure cruelty. In short, its no longer charming.