"Dannielle Tegeder: Painting in the Extended Field" Full-length Exhibition Video

I'm Tracy Adler, the director of the Ruth and Elmer Welland Museum of Art at Hamilton College and the curator of Danielle Tegeter, Painting in the Extended Field. Danielle Tegeter is a New York-based artist and this is her first solo museum exhibition. I'm excited to have my first solo museum show at the Welland and especially in a Machado and Silvetti building. My work has always been influenced by architecture, so to be in such an interesting space will, I think, be really inspirational and important for the work. For this exhibition, she's created a wall drawing that's over 80 feet in length and 18 feet tall that was created both with the artist as well as the contribution of Hamilton and Pratt students. We had over 50 students working on the wall drawing over a period of several weeks and it was a real collaborative and community building experience. When I initially invited Danielle to come up and create an exhibition for this space, I had her visit the museum when it was still under construction so that she could see the bones and the substructure of the building as it was coming together. And this architecture was really informative in terms of how she designed the wall drawing when she came here. We also were both really attracted to the windows in the gallery, which create an interesting stage of echoing the interior and the exterior and bringing them together. So you'll see echoes of the green paint in the wall drawing represented in the trees outside and our gray museum terrace is also echoed in a lot of the gray forms on the wall. Danielle had created some small-scale mobiles before this exhibition and I really wanted her to create something that would truly reflect the architecture of the space. So we had a fabricator work with Danielle to design and realize a large-scale mobile which hangs from the ceiling. The structure is made out of metal and it has glass elements hanging off of it and these glass elements really reflect a lot of the forms that you see in her drawing and painting. The Library of Abstract Sound was inspired by a previous piece of the same name from 2009 but features all new drawings. This particular work was created with the sound engineer skills of Benjamin Salzman, who is a student here at Hamilton, and together they developed a computer algorithm for interpreting the small-scale drawings so that they have a sound equivalent. In 2010, Danielle developed a series of five animations based on drawings she had made in 2009 and these animations in many ways were a realization of what she considered to be the drawings as actually functioning systems. In the animations, we see a lot of movement and activity that really show how these machines or structures or systems might actually work in the real world. We will be showing the animations on the side of the building, so again I'm really interacting with the architecture and that's a long, flat surface on the side of the building with no windows, which will be perfect to show it. Danielle created a large diptych painting for the exhibition. It's the largest painting that the artist has created to date. She worked on half of the painting in her studio and then brought it here to the Welland to complete it so she could truly respond to the space and the other work around it. Danielle Tegeter, Painting in the Extended Field, is on view at the Welland Museum of Art through July 28th.