DANNIELLE TEGEDER: PAINTING IN THE EXTENDED FIELD

At over eighty-feet-long, Tegeder’s wall drawing at the Wellin Museum—titled Ondam: Hollow Green Gray Velocity Transmitter with Tunnel Routes and Stations with Pipe Chrysalis Headquarters City Plan with Safety Routes in Snow Green with Developments Contraption and Triangle Headquarters with Complete Love Algorithm and Magnetic Diagram for Beauty with Methods and Analysis with Tower Manifesto and Ecstatic White Metallic Mine Tunnels and Pantone Structure with Yellow Categories with Luminous Connectors and Lemon Elevator Structures—is the largest to date, and results from studying the architectural blueprints, specifically the pipes, electrical conduits, beams, and invisible design components of the Museum’s new Machado and Silvetti-designed building. When Tegeder was first invited to show at the Wellin, she immediately came for a hardhat site visit in the summer of 2012, while the facility was still under construction, so she could record and observe the structure as it took shape. Tegeder particularly responded to the Exhibition Gallery’s windows—thin twenty- five-inch-wide apertures spanning the full height of the gallery’s eighteen-foot walls—and made them a central point for the new drawing. She visited the space at different times of day to study the quality of light and incorporated her observations into the design of the drawing. This type of objective research and synthesizing of information pervades Tegeder’s work and crosses into the various mediums she employs. 

In a significant way, wall drawing as a process was a long- sought fulfillment for an artist who has utilized architectural forms throughout her career. In Tegeder’s paintings and drawings from 1996 to 2003, the highly structured organization of her imagined cityscapes is defined with a clear horizon line that is firmly rooted in architectural design and urban planning. The forms that she developed within her earlier compositions still persist today. These continuously evolving shapes are assigned particular meanings and functions in what the artist describes as “safe cities”—plans for futuristic, underground metropolises that are yet-to-be inhabited, and that intimate a utopian, end-of-the world eventuality for civilization. 

- Excerpt from Dannielle Tegeder: Painting in the Extended Field by Tracy L. Adler 

Catalog available here

Drawing inspiration from urban planning, architecture, geography, and statistical data, among other sources, she comments upon the inherent beauty and interconnectivity between various social, mechanical, and informational systems. Stylistically evocative of Russian Constructivist and Suprematist art movements from the early twentieth century, Tegeder’s contemporary approach to abstraction employs new technology and multidisciplinary processes.

-Wellin Museum Press Release

“Dannielle Tegeder’s paintings depict constellations of imagined urban systems: roadways, electric lines, sewage pipes, and wireless networks that have been filtered through some Suprematist formal vocabulary. Painting in the Extended Field, her first solo museum exhibition at the brand new Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, features wall drawings, animated video works, sound, sculpture, and a mobile that test the parameters of what might be considered painting today.”

-Annie Godfrey Larmon for BOMB
Click here to read full interview