January 27 – March 17, 2017

Statement from Dana Saulnier:

“The longer I make art, the more it seems to teach me new ways to think. I prefer to believe that art generates meanings and ideas rather than believe that art carries meanings and ideas. I am compelled by painting that invites immediate perceptual responses. I want to engage the central nervous system of the viewer and speak to their body before speaking to a set of historicized categories. I try to evolve an image where perception and category are in tension and both these modes are ‘fragile’. This means I want seeing and feeling to complicate naming and categorizing. I do not want this to be a game, but rather the realization of a condition. I trust the body. I understand that my image making practices proliferate body-ness. The factual
experienced body should be a stubborn matter that challenges us to think. When we fall too quickly into our ready habits of representation we risk forgetting the tension of our singular being as always being within a relational situation. That forgetfulness flattens our experience. We can too readily distance ourselves from the facts of our individual and collective contingency. I hope to locate rifts and gaps in our sensual experiences where we might make transversal shifts between ways of finding ourselves. I think this mode of sensing is very different from
posing a puzzle for the intellect to solve and therefore master. Yet, paradoxically I try to do this through painting, knowing very well that painting has its history and traditions, its frameworks and theories. I do not deny such understandings… In truth, I love the way that painting calls forthlanguage, but the thing is, it seems to me that
painting devours theory and lives best by meaning more deeply by refusing to say.”