As you walk into Private Public’s darkened gallery, your state is likely to transition—in a matter of minutes—from disoriented to curious to mesmerized. Measuring over 20 feet in length, Ship/Dock/Three Houses and the Night Sky occupies nearly the entire gallery space, and the monumental piece is the esteemed artist Donna Dennis’s biggest and most ambitious work yet.
Formally, the work defies easy labels, at once referencing installation, sculpture, architecture, diorama, and tableau. Its scale and heft are more suggestive of an outdoor piece where visitors can walk around it and study it from different vantage points. Instead, it’s indoors, extending to the edges of the room and reaching toward the ceiling.
Like a large-scale diorama, visitors can’t walk around or through it, but rather are positioned in front of it, like a scene on a stage. Architecture in the form of a proscenium. With the room shrouded in darkness, the experience of Ship/Dock/Three Houses and the Night Sky could pass for a waking dream. But it only takes a few moments to realize that’s the point. The sense deprivation caused by the darkness and apparent stillness of the installation force a dramatic perceptual shift. As you give in to the work, your senses become heightened. The effect encourages a suspension of disbelief as it immerses you in a strange nocturnal tableau. You start to see, feel, and understand its meaning.
Ship/Dock/Three Houses and the Night Sky is a recreation of an ore dock located on Lake Superior. Projected images made from gouache drawings light the backdrop to a massive structure, showing a lake and horizon line. They slowly cycle from dawn to a starry night sky, hinting at an expansive space that seems to illogically continue beyond the edge of the gallery.
The massive structure consists of three small houses, which are perched within an elaborate network of crisscrossing beams, columns, and ladders. One white house is lit from within and faces us, a beacon in the night. A second white house faces the lake, horizon line, and a ship in the distance. The third house is much harder to detect: it’s black and situated in near-total darkness. Recorded audio subtly fills the space, comprising the soothing sounds of waves gently rolling in and knocking into the dock posts, which are set against the steadiness of a low drone. The baritone murmur could reference the ship in the distance or the soft moan of an animal. The rhythm of your own breathing gets mixed in there, too, as you contemplate this, transitioning into a desire to anthropomorphize this immense architecture. This inclination isn’t entirely unprompted. Throughout her decades-long career, Dennis’s work has continuously incorporated a play on self-portraiture.
Conceptually, Dennis’s work is about memory, journeying through space and time, selfhood, and the feminist desire to exercise agency, demonstrating one’s power by literally taking up space. White houses—from motels and tourist cabins to train cars and tunnel towers—feature prominently in Dennis’s work. They represent the temporary dwellings, house-like structures that aren’t home, stopping points on a journey that we all encounter en route to our final destinations.
These temporary structures began as facades made with collaged photographs in False Front Hotels (1972-1973). These were experiments with three-dimensionality, the first small leap from the wall for a trained painter. Subsequent work proved more daring as Dennis played with scale, depth, and mixed media. In Subway with Lighted Interior (1973-1974) and Station Hotel (1974), lightbulbs illuminate the interiors of structures that aren’t intended to be entered, evoking a different kind of false front, and adding the suggestion of a portal leading somewhere one will never know. Tourist Cabin Porch (Maine) (1976) marks a turning point toward creating work that is more self-reflective and personal. This is where the motif of the little white house takes shape as a kind of self-portrait, inspired by a childhood memory of Dennis’s of road tripping with her family and representing Dennis herself as the subject of this work. The subtlety of this reference is tucked away in the scale of this and future tourist cabins. “I made them my height,” Dennis reflects, “and the top of the door came to my eye level.” Looking at these cabins is a way of encountering the artist.
Dennis has always emotionally identified with buildings, especially old ones that were left to crumble or torn down. Until recently relocating to the Hudson Valley, she spent her artistic career in New York City and drew inspiration from it. She recalls, “At some point I identified that feeling I had about the buildings with a feeling of what had been lost in the voice of women.”
Dennis’s white houses became her own interpretation of a room of one’s own. Soon additional tourist cabins, station stops, covered passageways, and other structures followed as Dennis’s attentive observation of her surroundings and appreciation for vernacular continued. Over the course of decades, a body of architectural self-portraits amassed, signaling an ongoing journey and a physical and figurative expansion across space and time.
In the early aughts, the night sky started to make its way into Dennis’s work. Twinkling, distant celestial bodies proved an intimate compositional backdrop for her white houses, towers, and the labyrinthine structures of a roller coaster. These works were made in the heavy shadow of 9/11, at once meditating on loss and mortality while offering hope and the possibility of boundlessness.
Ship/Dock/Three Houses and the Night Sky is a culmination of the creative impulses, memories, and motifs that make up Dennis’s oeuvre. It builds on a previous work titled Ship and Dock/Nights and Days or the Gazer (2018), sharing the same general structure, backdrop, and soundscape, but adding a small black house to accompany the two small white houses, and thus physically expanding the work considerably. It’s possible to see Dennis in all three houses at three different stages of her life: past, present, and future. But they also suggest a trinity that exists in all of us: the optimist, the wanderer, and the realist. Taken together, the black house, the newest addition, amounts to the same thing: it’s a figure of death. Hidden in the shadows, it’s barely recognizable, lurking as a presence that functions more as an absence. On closer inspection, it shares the same scale as the other houses, but it’s in the shape of a parallelogram. The little black house is askew, not quite of this world but present, nonetheless.
Despite the gravity of what this work suggests, Ship/Dock/Three Houses and the Night Sky brings comfort. The entire gallery is transformed into a vessel for it, letting the meditative rhythm of the soundscape, the almost imperceptible shift from day to night, and the surrounding darkness overwhelm you. It offers a life in three acts, or a full life brought into view in a tableau of reflection, resistance, and calm. Moreover, it creates the possibility of not only occupying but fully becoming a room of one’s own.
Donna Dennis’s Ship/Dock/Three Houses and the Night Sky is on view at Private Public Gallery in Hudson, NY from April 22 through May 28, 2023.
Natasha Chuk is an arts writer, curator, and scholar.
