What is a drawing? At this point, it may be anything from the Nazca lines inscribed by ancient people in the soil in Peru to a picture generated by artificial intelligence. Both of these examples suggest energy, ideas and unknown forces, which is what Trisha Donnelly displays in nearly 40 works on paper, photographs, video and sculpture, created over the last 25 years and currently on view at the Drawing Center in SoHo.
Donnelly is not known for drawing, and that makes this exhibition intriguing. She built her reputation by making works that are austere, conceptual, poetic — and often unsettling. In “The Redwood and the Raven” (2004), displayed at the Tate museum in London, 31 photographs captured a dancer performing a piece choreographed to Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven” (1845).
Except the photographs weren’t all displayed at the same time; one was shown per day on a rotating basis. For the 2002 opening of a New York gallery exhibition, Donnelly arrived on a horse, dressed in Napoleonic-era costume and delivered a speech announcing that the emperor had surrendered. The address ended with the words “I am electric.”
That sense of enigma and electricity permeates her show at the Drawing Center, curated by Olivia Shao. Almost all the works here are untitled. The ones on paper are generally abstract with sinuous, creeping lines drawn in ink. Some of the objects in these look like pieces of driftwood, bones (Georgia O’Keeffe’s “pelvis” paintings of dried-out animal skeletons come to mind), ragged textile fragments or ectoplasm, that amorphous substance ostensibly secreted during Victorian-era occult seances.
One haunting drawing, titled “hedm!” (2005), which looks like a piece of fabric or bark cracking down the middle, includes golden ovals with the letters spelling “hedm!” backward, and a light behind them, illuminating the ovals. Turns out, these letters stand for the German phrase “Herr, Erbarme Dich Meiner!” (“My Lord, have mercy on me), a phrase that appeared most famously in Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” with Peter expressing his remorse for denying Jesus. The phrase also appears, with very similar lettering, in “The Book of Signs” (1930), by the German typographer and calligrapher Rudolf Koch, which included alchemical as well as religious symbols.
In addition to the drawings here are a handful of other works. A rectangular piece of marble sitting on the floor is marked with cryptic notches like a relic of a civilization — or an ode to minimalism in art. (Donnelly showed similar works in marble at the Venice Biennale in 2011.) Untitled photographs and a video with glowing orbs capture ghosts in the machine: spheres and forms that look like burned-out suns or planets.
If you’re craving other clues to Donnelly’s inspirations and references, one is in the Drawing Center’s news statement for the show, which includes a quotation from the “Tao Te Ching” by Lao Tzu, a cornerstone of secular, metaphysical Chinese thought. The quotation appears on the center’s website and reads:
The unspeakable.
In the dao, The spirit of the valley never dies.
This is called the mysterious female.
The gateway of the mysterious female
Is called the root of heaven and earth.
Dimly visible, it seems as if it were there,
Yet use will never drain it.
Origins, sources — these are what we often crave to know in art, and what Donnelly denies us. The “Dao” (the way) is considered shapeless, a void, which is also an impossible assignment for an artist making physical objects. And yet, artists achieved this for centuries in their drawings and sculptures that depicted religious miracles, supernatural events, women being impregnated with rays of light and saints ascending to celestial realms. In lieu of these types of subjects, Donnelly, instead, offers us pure energy, marks and forms.
Another clue to Donnelly’s work lurks in the gallery next to her show. Here, an exhibition also curated by Shao, “Voice of Space: UFOs and Paranormal Phenomena,” features diagrams and drawings by artists like René Magritte, Paulina Peavy, and Indigenous artists such as He Nupa Wanica (Joseph No Two Horns). An untitled drawing with barklike lines by Donnelly is included in this show. Another drawing by Donnelly appears in “Voice of Space” but is listed on the checklist for Donnelly’s own exhibition in the adjoining gallery — a detail that only attentive, mindful observers will notice.
The wall-label descriptions in the “UFO” show feature words that seem apropos of Donnelly: alchemy, paranormal, astrology, energy fields, celestial and vibrational forces, mysticism, talismans, metaphysics, signals, enigmas, specters. She has mentioned some of these ideas in the past and they seem like perfect descriptions — references, explanations — for many of the drawings on view here.
These include my favorite works in the show: the photographs and video of eerie shapes and some of the very recent drawings, in which her spectral forms seem more boldly materialized.
One last clue: I hate to tie too much to biography but Donnelly, a San Francisco native, also feels very much in that city’s artistic tradition of mining alternative and meditative states, as well as mysticism. Ultimately, her show is difficult and unyielding. However, with no wall labels and limited information, the pressure is off. Dimly lit and quiet, the room is like a modern chapel. You can give yourself over to meditation, or reverie. Drawing becomes a portal where ancient and new energies meet and the unspeakable, as the Dao says, unfolds into the infinite.
Trisha Donnelly
Through Feb. 1, the Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, Manhattan; 212-219-2166, drawingcenter.org.
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