Cynthia Daignault was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and currently lives in New York. She has a BA from Stanford University. She has participated as a MacDowell Colony Fellow in 2010 and was the recipient of the 2011 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant. She has presented solo shows at Lisa Cooley, and White Columns in New York.
Cynthia Daignault explores the manner in which light, location, recording, memory, and media coalesce. Her work is mimetic, replicating common images and perspectives without exactitude. The rendered paintings present banal and pedestrian images in a similar manner to how Vija Celmins’ early work captured the nature of everyday objects. However, Daignault does not provide the same sort of introspection. The work is a little slapstick and apathetic, providing a sense of subversion in image making more akin to the removed inexpressive and methodical paint handling and palette of a Luc Tuyman’s.
It could be easy for this work to fall into painting that merely responds to contemporary methods of recording. The CCTV monitor paintings are an example of this – treading on fragile ground that could easily flat line. Although, I love those paintings because of the distance created by presenting multiple perspectives. It forces the viewer to imagine two locations, a continuation of time, and oscillates between understood description and gauzy inspecific place, forcing me to wonder, and I like that.
What I appreciate most in this work is its ability to be so much about contemporary relationships to everyday experiences while simultaneously speaking so clearly about the idiosyncrasies and history of painting. Specifically, it’s Daigneault’s obsession with light and its relationship to memory that captures my attention. Daigneault investigates through image making the way in which light records time, passes through spaces, projects signs, affects space, and captures images.
Check out more of Cynthia Daignault’s work here.
– Rachel MacFarlane
