Dannielle Tegeder: Chrysopoeia
Tegeder’s new body of work includes paintings and mobiles that draw from an architectural language of blueprints and mechanical drawings. A parallel interest in cosmological systems, understood through occult methods for accessing the divine, also informs the work. Tegeder’s paintings reflect her systems-thinking through conceptual and material experimentation. The paintings incorporate the familiar aesthetic of board games and invoke the rules of delimited spaces that make collective world-building.
Tegeder reduces and expands her visual language in a new series of mobiles; taking symbols off the canvas and exploring interactions between space and structure. These suspended works introduce contingent symbols hung in a delicate balance, freeing pictorial elements to respond to architecture and atmosphere.
The mobiles also reference histories absent from conventional modernist narratives: from vernacular folk objects, like witch ladders—magic objects meant to catch negative energy—to the woman of the Bauhaus who turned to mobiles and toys to experiment with formalism while stimulating play, learning, and utopian imaginaries.
