The technical, schematic style of Dannielle Tegeder constructs a utopian system of form, connection, and flow. Her diagrammatic idiom explores the hidden relationships that underpin not only our physical lives – electrical lines, plumbing, and public transport – but also the connections that power our spiritual lives, from everyday emotions to ritual and the divine. In the tradition of early abstract painter Hilma af Klint (1862 – 1944), whose abstract compositions were intended as a site for spiritual communication, Tegeder’s work references the long history of abstraction as a medium to commune with an unseen universe.
Trance Notations features the paintings and drawings of Tegeder, created in collaboration with the conceptual poet and trance practitioner, K (Kristin) Prevallet (trancepoetics.com). Each drawing was completed by Tegeder while in a trance state induced by Prevallet and documented on video. Through this process, the historic practice of automatic drawing – foundational to early twentieth century Surrealism – is referenced. As the Surrealists used automatism to tap into nodes of subconscious meaning, the process of depersonalization allows Tegeder and Prevallet to explore the embodied gesture as an index of the unconscious. Tegeder and Prevallet’s hypnosis practice also draws on the fraught legacy of hypnosis as a treatment for female “hysteria” in the nineteenth century.
Accompanying these drawings are five large-scale paintings with corresponding guided meditations by Prevallet. Through slow looking and somatic awareness, the viewer is invited to journey into Tegeder’s unique world of shapes, arrangements, and geometries to explore the connection between artwork and mind.
In exploring various historical legacies of spiritual imagery and automatic communication, Tegeder interrogates the traditional Modernist canon that privileges Greenbergian hard-edge abstraction and formal understandings of medium-specificity and purity over the long visual histories of magic, spirituality, and the divine.
