Cheryl Donegan: My Plastic Bag

My Plastic Bag is Cheryl Donegan's first comprehensive exhibition and refers to Scenes + Commercials, an exhibition organized by American curator Johanna Burton at the New Museum in New York. In its condensed form, Scenes + Commercials pinpointed the difficulty of understanding Donegan's work in established discourses, thus offering an explanation as to why her work has remained subversive until today. In this regard it is interesting to note that Donegan has largely been seen as a video artist even though she is also a painter. In her practice, the artist confronts painting with new media, its modes of production and circulation and its immateriality. She does so with a persistence and pleasure that taunts the professionalism and production values that have come to dictate the art (and our lives) in the last two decades. This results in an art that is knowledgeable, but chooses to undermine its knowledge. It is based on a rare casualness that shows itself to be searching to trace the place of art as a spot that may have been lost a long time ago.

Donegan's works will be shown in 2018 at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, curated by Bill Arning, and at the Aspen Art Museum, curated by Heidi Zuckerman. A catalog will be published on the occasion of all three exhibitions.