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拍品专文
A deeply intimate portrait, We Need to Talk by Danielle Mckinney is filled with noirish, cinematic moments. Often featuring a lone female protagonist, “Mckinney’s paintings are peppered with bright details—often in the form of brightly colored nails, artistic references on the walls of her interiors, and the lit ends of cigarettes” (S. Eckardt, “In the Studio With Danielle Mckinney, the Artist Bringing Intimate Moments to Life,” W Magazine, September 28, 2022, https://www.wmagazine.com/culture/danielle-mckinney-interview-marianne-boesky-studio-visit). With a background in photography, Mckinney paints with an acute awareness of the female gaze, employing deeply colorful hues and nuanced details with cinematic effect.
The present work challenges the viewers understanding of perspective, creating an arresting scene not unlike Vincent van Gogh’s epochal Bedroom at Arles (1888). It is no coincidence that Mckinney studied in the commune of Pont-Aven in Northwestern France, where van Gogh’s contemporary and interlocutor Paul Gauguin painted some of his most famous landscapes. Mckinney starts each canvas with a layer of black gesso, from which she builds her haunting interiors. Here, a woman lies horizontally along a bed—a moment of turmoil that could reference Sherman’s swooning woman in Untitled Film Still. Each of Mckinney’s paintings is in the process of fading in, like a transitional moment in a film. In fact, We Need to Talk is based on the short film Killing Time (1979) by Fronza Woods, a pioneering Black woman filmmaker. Woods recalls, “What I was trying to recreate was an internal monologue” (F. Woods, quoted in M. Williams and D. Shreir, “Two Films by Fronza Woods,” Another Screen, 2021, https://www.another-screen.com/two-films-by-fronza-woods). This urge to describe her characters’ interior lives also inspires Mckinney, “It’s important for me to leave room for people to build their own story…The figure always comes first and then I create the interior around her” (D. Mckinney, quoted in A. Keenan, “Danielle Mckinney Embraces the Golden Hour,” Cultured Magazine, October 12, 2022, https://www.culturedmag.com/article/2022/10/12/danielle-mckinney-golden-hour-painter-motherhood).
Mckinney’s desire to tell these stories has captured the attention of the art world. Her work is held by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. She has been included in celebrated group shows, such as Heroic Bodies at the Rudolph Tegners Museum, Dronningmølle, Denmark, IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY at the Contemporary Austin, and Black Melancholia at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson.
We Need to Talk is a guarded painting, but its title is also an invitation to engage and ask questions. Mckinney considers the vast lives of her protagonists, even as she thinks about her viewers, who bring to each canvas their own stories. We might imagine ourselves to be heroes and heroines of our own films, and be inspired by Mckinney’s elevation of moments both fantastical and mundane.
The present work challenges the viewers understanding of perspective, creating an arresting scene not unlike Vincent van Gogh’s epochal Bedroom at Arles (1888). It is no coincidence that Mckinney studied in the commune of Pont-Aven in Northwestern France, where van Gogh’s contemporary and interlocutor Paul Gauguin painted some of his most famous landscapes. Mckinney starts each canvas with a layer of black gesso, from which she builds her haunting interiors. Here, a woman lies horizontally along a bed—a moment of turmoil that could reference Sherman’s swooning woman in Untitled Film Still. Each of Mckinney’s paintings is in the process of fading in, like a transitional moment in a film. In fact, We Need to Talk is based on the short film Killing Time (1979) by Fronza Woods, a pioneering Black woman filmmaker. Woods recalls, “What I was trying to recreate was an internal monologue” (F. Woods, quoted in M. Williams and D. Shreir, “Two Films by Fronza Woods,” Another Screen, 2021, https://www.another-screen.com/two-films-by-fronza-woods). This urge to describe her characters’ interior lives also inspires Mckinney, “It’s important for me to leave room for people to build their own story…The figure always comes first and then I create the interior around her” (D. Mckinney, quoted in A. Keenan, “Danielle Mckinney Embraces the Golden Hour,” Cultured Magazine, October 12, 2022, https://www.culturedmag.com/article/2022/10/12/danielle-mckinney-golden-hour-painter-motherhood).
Mckinney’s desire to tell these stories has captured the attention of the art world. Her work is held by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. She has been included in celebrated group shows, such as Heroic Bodies at the Rudolph Tegners Museum, Dronningmølle, Denmark, IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY at the Contemporary Austin, and Black Melancholia at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson.
We Need to Talk is a guarded painting, but its title is also an invitation to engage and ask questions. Mckinney considers the vast lives of her protagonists, even as she thinks about her viewers, who bring to each canvas their own stories. We might imagine ourselves to be heroes and heroines of our own films, and be inspired by Mckinney’s elevation of moments both fantastical and mundane.