Emerging Dissolving is an installation that submerges its viewer into the love stories collected by artist Danielle Wyckoff. Love stories are lightly handwritten on mulberry paper scrolls that stream and unfurl across the length of the gallery. Viewers are encouraged to examine the individual scrolls and walk amongst the love stories. Only on view for the exhibition opening, the scrolls hung over a pool of red salt water. Evidence of the pool’s detritus remains with crystallized salt rings on the floor and the red salt that dyed the scrolls that fell into the pool. The scrolls cast shadows across the gallery walls and continue the repetitive nature and immersive quality of the installation.
Wyckoff’s text based drawings and installations explore the question, “what is it to love?” The installation Emerging Dissolving, emphasizes the process of story telling as a preservation of past loves and ways of loving. She sees the common experience of love and losing love as a connection between people. The artist also makes comparisons to the immersive experience of love and water.
The Emerging Dissolving installation uses storytelling to illustrate the dichotomies and shifting qualities of love and water, “their beauty and breathlessness, and their terror and transience.” The red salt pool further illustrates this relationship through salt’s preserving and corrosive characteristics. The color of the red salt references love and anger, blood and earth. Danielle Wyckoff’s text drawings and installation exhibition, Emerging Dissolving, is on view at Soltesz Fine Art Gallery until September 19, 2015.
Emerging Dissolving, Danielle Wyckoff. Soltesz Fine Art, 1825 NW 23rd AVE, Portland Or.
Very well written
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