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2/3/2007

Donelle Woolford

Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris

A Narrative by Joe Scanlan

Donell 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 made intentionally to coincide with and challenge the centennial anniversary of that movement.

From close inspection, Donell Woolford’s 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 Donell Woolford, having been made aware of the twentieth century’s 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: Donell Woolford is a narrative by Joe Scanlan.

For the last six years, Joe Scanlan has worked with Donell Woolford as an alter ego for his cubist paintings. Though lying passively in disguise for years, Donell Woolford, whose written character is an amalgam of myth, fact, aesthetics and economics, rises from the page to become a real walking and talking artist who IS the living embodiment of her work. The essential question posed by Donell Woolford—or, to be more precise, Joe Scanlan—is the willingness to be free, to be imaginative, to do whatever is necessary in order 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, us, 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. “

Donell Woolford, Narrative artist. Donell Woolford, Cubist painter. Donell Woolford, avatar. The possibilities are endless.

Opening on March 3rd 2007 from 6 to 9 pm

Galerie Chez Valentin
9, rue Saint-Gilles - Paris
Free admission

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