Violet Dennison’s work illuminates how modern technology reshapes our minds – makes them inattentive, unpredictable, frenetic, riddled with anxiety, rotten beyond repair and endlessly fascinating. Of course, there are many artists who explore that topic, but Dennison has chosen a uniquely traditional method for delving into the follies and foibles of our disjuncted psyche – oil painting.
Dennison’s new show at Tara Downs Gallery, ‘Damaged Self’, features abstract paintings that she has, in her own words, ‘pushed into a chaotic physiological space’. ‘I was playing off more traditional abstracts, like Rothko, [where the canvas is] a meditative space,’ Dennison tells me as we walk around the Soho gallery before the opening night. ‘And here it is a menacing space. There’s an anxiety under all of it.’
