Donelle Woolford: A Narrative
by Joe Tang
Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris
Number 1
Eating with Chopsticks
Still Life with Hanging Lamp
Palimpsest
Explosion In A Shingle Factory
Night Life (for Joseph Stella)
Sète (for Paul Valéry)
Still Life with Logotype
Lute
La Patisserie
Tabula Rasa
Still Life with Windowshade
Columbine
Down South
Harlem Renaissance
Desktop Publishing
Wood scraps, enamel paint, latex paint, wood glue, screws
65 x 50 cm / 50 x 40 cm
Donelle Woolford is an African American woman artist of the 21st century. Her medium is wood. Working alone in the remote corner of a lumber reclamation factory in the shadows of a faded industrial town, she rekindles past glories by reconstructing them from memory. Her assemblage paintings, Cubist in spirit, are intentionally made to coincide with and challenge the centennial anniversary of that movement.
From close inspection, Donelle WoolfordÍs work seems to be postmodernism wrapped in identity politics filtered through memory and personal experience. The question is, on which memories are her reconstructions based? African art? Postmodernism? A manufacturing-based economy? Cubism? When images just come to you, when they just well up out of the debris under your feet as if by instinct, where do they come from? Is Donelle Woolford, having been made aware of the twentieth centuryÍs dominant aesthetic by various institutions of higher learning, merely regurgitating it on their behalf? Or is she reaching back, like a time machine, through Picasso and Braque to a more distant West African ancestry? And given the Postmodern theories of cultural origin and influence that are the basis of Identity politics, is that kind of dissimilation even possible?
As one investigates further, we come back to the beginning of the story: Donelle Woolford is a narrative by Joe Scanlan.
Over the past six years, Joe Scanlan has worked with Donelle Woolford as an alter ego for his Cubist paintings. Though lying passively in disguise for years, Donelle Woolford, a character spawned from an amalgam of myth, fact, aesthetics and economics, now rises from the page to become a real, walking, talking artist, the living embodiment of her work.
The essential question posed by Donelle Woolford„or, to be more precise, Joe Scanlan„is the willingness of the artist to be free, to be imaginative, to do whatever is necessary to construct the best narrative possible. If that narrative is compelling, and if its characters and ideas and material props are desirable, then the commodification of art and politics that ensues has the potential to change the dialogue between art and the consumers of art„that is, between art and its audience. If one of the consequences of that potential, that change, is that one artist must recede into the background so that another can take center stage, then so be it. To quote Joe Scanlan: "I try not to let myself get in the way of a good idea."
Donelle Woolford, Narrative artist. Donelle Woolford, Cubist painter. Donelle Woolford, avatar. The possibilities are endless.
galerie@galeriechezvalentin.com
More Donelle Woolford
65 x 50 cm
$10,000 shipped
50 x 40 cm
$8,000 shipped
