Three Questions with Dannielle Tegeder on Trance Notations
On the occasion of my new exhibition Trance Notations at the Monahan Gallery, University of St. Thomas, I sat down with writer and PhD candidate Emeline Boehringer to discuss hypnosis, abstraction, and the history of attention.
Trance Notations includes new work you made while under hypnosis with collaborator K Prevallet— when did you start working together?
K and I have been working together for a long time. She works with artists and writers with chronic pain, and we initially began trance sessions to address my fear of flying. As I worked with abstraction and spiritualism through my collective Hilma’s Ghost, I became interested in bridging trance and my painting practice.
How does working under hypnosis affect your process as a painter?
I feel completely unconscious. K brings me back to the surface and helps to direct the rhythm of the work. The end product are compositions that feel uniquely connected in a deep way.
K describes our joint process as “ekphrasis,” which is the literary device of describing artworks in detail in fiction or poetry. Hypnosis is a linguistic experience. K speaks and I listen, so the ekphrasis works backwards in a way. I generate an image from the ‘poetry’ of the trance.
Trance Notations includes meditative audio prompts that direct the viewers’ experience with each painting for a certain amount of time, guiding the eye around the image. Why did you include these, and do you see the exhibition as speaking to contemporary anxieties around attention, or even popular practices of mindfulness or teletherapy?
We’re connecting to a history of attention that goes back to the early 20th century. The surrealists were interested in accessing unconscious states through automatic writing. Many women artists associated with transcendentalism used painting to direct the mind towards intense experiences of depersonalization through deep focus.
Abstraction from the very beginning was closely tied to the question of attention. In these cases, painting was also connected to collective experiences in that it provoked mental states present in rituals, seances, and collaborative work.
