Violet Dennison makes paintings with the precision and foresight of an installation artist. This is an affectation that the Bridgeport, Connecticut–born artist developed over nearly a decade of showing sculpture—frequently in Europe, where the young conceptualist found a following amongst kunsthalle directors with the resources and room to chase her ideas down the rabbit hole.
Dennison, 34, fondly recalls arriving to install solo exhibitions with nothing but a “recipe”—no art—to execute. For her, “recipe” is a flexible-enough term to include serious acts of plumbing, as evidenced by her 2017 show “Transcend” at Jan Kaps gallery in Cologne.
For Pipe Re-Route, one of the exhibition’s many interventions, the artist laparatomized the bathroom wall, redirecting the faucet to flow onto her longtime gallery's floor. You knew when people washed their hands: The dribble became a gush.
At the New Museum Triennial a year later, Dennison arrived with bundles of Floridian seagrass. She liked the hydrophyte’s wellness-industry associations and its relentless impulse to ejaculate seeds and lasso passersby into becoming unwitting messengers in their odyssey back to the sea. At some point during the triennial, the curators decided the seagrass was a little too eager, and Dennison was obliged to glue the thalassic strands down.
As an artist, Dennison revels in unexpected results, like misbehaving seaweed. The element of surprise keeps her coming back day after day to her treehouse-like studio in New York’s Financial District.
Lately, her experiments have been drifting toward her first love: oil paint. She reminisces about a devout high school art teacher who taught her to mix pigments, and an undergraduate experience at New York University that later turned her allegiances to conceptualism.
Today, her process hews more closely to the latter. It is preparation-intensive and finishes with a burst of athleticism. Some ideas start on paper, others on the screen, and then they switch, migrating from digital space to easel and back again until a satisfying composition arrives on canvas.
“[When I was working on installations], I realized art can happen very fast. That is how I work,” says Dennison. “Don't let the paint dry.” This means not being too precious, even when her current subject matter is Ovidian mythology and the symbology of flowers.
There are things in the pipeline as always, like her show at Jan Kaps this past summer, but it’s too early to know what direction the water is flowing just yet.
For more about CULTURED's 2023 Young Artists, read our features with Adraint Khadafhi Bereal, Theresa Chromati, and Emma Stern.
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