Dana Powell: Night Tripper: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

Dana Powell’s newest body of work is a continued portrayal of the familiar and mundane with a mysterious and sometimes unsettling undertone. Small-scale oil paintings depict ordinary moments in time - dark roads, weather, grubby interiors, and still lifes. Considered austerity is apparent in each painting. Using thinly applied oil paint on tightly woven linen, the artist omits extraneous detail in both subject and medium. Acutely captured, these paintings are simple, common scenes, but when viewed together the paintings develop a cinematic suspense, a narrative that Powell encourages but doesn’t explicitly detail.

Pushing paintings beyond face value interpretation, the artist’s core strategies are often rooted in the ambiguity of an object or scenario. Extremes of weather and fire are the most dramatic depictions, and Powell continues to celebrate the contradiction of innocence and danger in her psychological night narratives. Cinematic details and an impermeable ambience describe a suspense that is not outright thrilling, but faintly ominous and occasionally joyful.

Powell’s pleasure in painting comes from the process of it. The solitude, capriciousness, and independence required greatly influence the evocative mood, and imagination, in her work.

Born in 1989 in Milwaukee, WI, Dana Powell lives and works in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The artist graduated with a BFA from Cooper Union in 2015 and completed a residency at the Still House Group the following year.

All installation images above: Photo by Pierre Le Hors