You get close and see what could be there, in the biopsy of another time, perhaps.
The question does not expect inquisitive thinking but a ready existence from the bland, mundane realm. Two fried eggs, a chimney, a doorknob, a loaded power strip—the everyday objects in Powell’s nifty paintings are almost the opposite of Tino Sehgal’s quaint chant “This Is So Contemporary.” Instead of blown to a surreal scale, or extracted from the context, Powell’s objects do not morph into an alternative presence, but suggest an entire absence. The road signs remain reticent, while you poke at their surface, trying hard as if to provoke a napping lion in the zoo, the caged, segregated hero supposedly singing the epic. Rather than the cultural past, what is indeed evoked becomes a viewing experience closer to a wax museum visit. The figures appear so real— you tell your friends at the show— which means you think they’re not. From Powell’s canvas you don’t see a sharp contour that delineates the eggs against the cast iron pan; neither can you picture a slippery illusion when the eggs are burnt and the smoke starts to alert you. Everything is deprived of their individual potential but mashed in a particular moment with a fixed perspective. Stillness. Light is essentially still in your eye, not a rippling wave or a fleeting particle, so you get to capture it on canvas. It requires certain imagination to picture the young Vermeer operating the (speculated) optical device while thrilled by its exquisite capacity, a technique yet to be embraced by art historical studies. You see it as Vermeer did, and you feel proud.
image: Dana Powell, on view at Tanya Bonakdar, June 2019, photo: Y.Z.
When the protagonist’s house is set on fire in Dominga Sotomayor’s Too Late to Die Young—probably because of Powell’s burner—and she escapes into the forest, you don’t seem to see a way out. The boundary between the object, the character, the backdrop, and the historical context are all washed, though they remain perfectly legible at a retinal level. Imaginarily, the world is cut open and waits for an autopsy deadly still, while yearning to see and tell.
The potential sits comfortably at where it trembles, refusing the idea of a synthetic and digestible creation. It actually decays and lingers. A contemporary voyeur might be baffled by the object that attempts to muffle its aroma or clattering noise, whereas a remote visitor gets to gasp at the timeless glamor of the vestiges, unearthed accidentally. Readers, unlike those deeply captivated in the cinema, are invited to stand and peruse from afar; this invitation, of course, is embedded with a reductive expectation that observers only perform an observatory function.