Lisa Donneson

Doppelgangers & Time Capsules: The Irreversible Work of Lisa Dannesson.

So much of what we presume to be a present trend in our work-making stems, almost exclusively, from deep-seated and wishful communiques with our past. It is a reflection. We usher into the world a significant accumulation from our past, both personal and political, that often mixes and congeals with something new, blended through the miasma of hazy memories, metastasizing into something amorphous yet recognizable, uncanny, but not too specific. It is unlocked as we begin to channel our ideas from the memory hovels and palaces of our being, built with uncertainty. Their mirrors and hallways hint at our desires, failures, and traumas, and are executed by the act of creation. What comes from the well within is an irreversible order, one that can only suggest permutations, iterations, but follows the hidden and circuitous route of our beliefs, experiences, shadows, and doubts. It is irreversible, as it is our own self that constructs the order of the creative experience, alchemizing the world into our individuated place within it.

Although this might read negatively, it is imperative to examine the paradigms of self-exploration to understand that what we are attempting as artists is not the creation of the new, but rather to exhibit, illuminate, and underscore that which is already present in our subconscious. This exhumation of subject matter, character, and self presents a sheen of nostalgia, reflection, and memory, often tapped and emerging from beneath the floorboards of the home we have built within ourselves. In a way, what comes, formed through the flotsam and jetsam of this excavation, is a mythical object, an image, wrought from all those experiences, thoughts, and feelings, coagulated into the image/object, a birthing of unresolved ends, yet an object present enough to inform the weight of the intellectual steamer trunk that it arrives in. This trunk or time capsule might be understood by someone else as a form of mimicry on the part of the author. Mimicry itself is a form of doubling, an evolution of biological traits. Memories themselves are biological. Subjectivity is biological. Our adaptation in creation is reflexive and undeterred. It is in our being. It is an act of sovereignty against death.

In Lisa Donnespon’s Irreversible Order, we find her confrontation of death through the act of representation. She wields an invisible shovel, uncovering, digging in, and retrieving memories through a Proustian sense of objecthood—the smell of coffee, the rising steam of cooked leeks, and the sensation of plunging her nail into newly baked, warm bread act as metaphorical triggers for memory. The Crackerjack America she grew up in (baseball prize included), so changed, remains the same doppelganger image of America, with its oblique, double-towered boxes shouldering in ruin on a crisp and clear Tuesday morning in the early autumn of September 2001.

Irreversible Order is more than a sum of its memories, it is also a performative body of work in which Lisa, standing in as, well, Lisa, combines an alternate version of herself whom she interacts which, acts out playful interludes of domesticity, and with mirth situates herself amongst vestigial remnants of cleaning products, hinting at the shared trauma of our recent sheltering past. Her double presents as an adaptation, a mirage that helps her shovel and uncover, retrieve, and represent. What we find, is a life of memories on display, confronting the present, with a touch of absurdity and a fierce recognition of the self along the historical American timeline. Irreversible Order is a most earnest attempt at interiority and the complex and illuminating engagement of self.

Brad Feuerhelm