In some delicate oblique way
Exhibited at Post Office Projects, Adelaide (2023)
Dani Reynolds’ practice is a Sisyphean one. One that “operates according to a cycle of failure and repetition, of non-attainment and replay; [one that] is a punctuated performance. A rule is drawn. An action is required. An attempt is made. Over and over, again and again.” [1]
Here, the rule drawn was twofold: make a painting; replicate a garden statue. The actions as well: paint; mould. Attempts were multiple, failed, and repeated— over and over, again and again. Yet, rather than considering this setting oneself up for failure as a pity party, Dani invites us to imagine failure as a way of refuting dominant goal oriented ideology. How? Through a choreographing of ambivalence. The space is thus a partition of said ambivalence, and the repeated gestures, a series of rehearsals, as we’re thrown for a Sisyphean loop.
There’s something lingering, hesitating in Dani’s work, a kind of drawn out gesticulation before an eventual final act. Like a metabolic process. The artist’s obsession for a handmade Pekingese dog lawn statue in their neighbourhood led to a deal with a garden manager for a temporary loan of the masterpiece— a catalyst for the artist to learn moulding techniques formerly foreign to them. The replication and repetition reveal themselves then both as attempts at attaining the imperfect handmade mini-monument, and as ways of avoiding any fixed, dictated notion of what it is. This monumental ambivalence sneaks its way into Dani’s large-scale paintings as well. Hanging from up-right metal structures, the canvases are not only extracted from a canonical history of painting, but also transformed into bearers of other images. Small photographs of objects and situations— they, too, ambivalent— encrust themselves on the backs of the paintings, doubling their nature.
Although adorned with an unclear status, the paintings are not to be considered as failures, but rather as supports of ambivalence that document that very feeling: their surfaces bare traces of figuration that disappear behind successive layers of unsureness. “Something scratched out or scribbled over = willful act of erasure, anger, negation, disgust, hate; embarrassment, shame, or a wish to make invisible or to obliterate,” wrote Amy Sillman. [2] The scribbling here may be a willful act of erasure, but rather than solely being understood as done in negation, it reveals the ambivalence necessary to navigating an incoherent world, and the beauty of existing in multiple ways. [3] Dani Reynolds’ Sisyphean choreography can thus be read as a way of flirting with bathos— or comically failed attempts at presenting artistic greatness— in some delicate oblique way.
– Katia Porro
Katia Porro is a curator, writer and translator. She is currently the director of In extenso (Clermont Ferrand, France) and the magazine
La Belle
[1] Emma Cocker, “Over and Over, Again and Again,” in Documents of Contemporary Art: Failure, ed. Lisa Le Feuvre, London,
Whitechapel, 2010, p. 154.
[2] Amy Sillman, Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawings, Paris, After 8 books, 2022, p.113.
[3] Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, Durham, Duke University Press, 2011.
Exhibited at Post Office Projects, Adelaide (2023)
Dani Reynolds’ practice is a Sisyphean one. One that “operates according to a cycle of failure and repetition, of non-attainment and replay; [one that] is a punctuated performance. A rule is drawn. An action is required. An attempt is made. Over and over, again and again.” [1]
Here, the rule drawn was twofold: make a painting; replicate a garden statue. The actions as well: paint; mould. Attempts were multiple, failed, and repeated— over and over, again and again. Yet, rather than considering this setting oneself up for failure as a pity party, Dani invites us to imagine failure as a way of refuting dominant goal oriented ideology. How? Through a choreographing of ambivalence. The space is thus a partition of said ambivalence, and the repeated gestures, a series of rehearsals, as we’re thrown for a Sisyphean loop.
There’s something lingering, hesitating in Dani’s work, a kind of drawn out gesticulation before an eventual final act. Like a metabolic process. The artist’s obsession for a handmade Pekingese dog lawn statue in their neighbourhood led to a deal with a garden manager for a temporary loan of the masterpiece— a catalyst for the artist to learn moulding techniques formerly foreign to them. The replication and repetition reveal themselves then both as attempts at attaining the imperfect handmade mini-monument, and as ways of avoiding any fixed, dictated notion of what it is. This monumental ambivalence sneaks its way into Dani’s large-scale paintings as well. Hanging from up-right metal structures, the canvases are not only extracted from a canonical history of painting, but also transformed into bearers of other images. Small photographs of objects and situations— they, too, ambivalent— encrust themselves on the backs of the paintings, doubling their nature.
Although adorned with an unclear status, the paintings are not to be considered as failures, but rather as supports of ambivalence that document that very feeling: their surfaces bare traces of figuration that disappear behind successive layers of unsureness. “Something scratched out or scribbled over = willful act of erasure, anger, negation, disgust, hate; embarrassment, shame, or a wish to make invisible or to obliterate,” wrote Amy Sillman. [2] The scribbling here may be a willful act of erasure, but rather than solely being understood as done in negation, it reveals the ambivalence necessary to navigating an incoherent world, and the beauty of existing in multiple ways. [3] Dani Reynolds’ Sisyphean choreography can thus be read as a way of flirting with bathos— or comically failed attempts at presenting artistic greatness— in some delicate oblique way.
– Katia Porro
Katia Porro is a curator, writer and translator. She is currently the director of In extenso (Clermont Ferrand, France) and the magazine
La Belle
[1] Emma Cocker, “Over and Over, Again and Again,” in Documents of Contemporary Art: Failure, ed. Lisa Le Feuvre, London,
Whitechapel, 2010, p. 154.
[2] Amy Sillman, Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawings, Paris, After 8 books, 2022, p.113.
[3] Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, Durham, Duke University Press, 2011.