Mile Marker 58: A Softer Way Through, by Dana Donaty
The Alumni Gallery at Moore College of Art and Design
1916 Race St.
Philadelphia
Showing May 3 - June 12
Seen May 20
“Woman must write herself … women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes and rhetorics, regulations and codes.”
Those lines by feminist literary theorist Helene Cixous hang next to Dana Donaty’s nude self portraits currently on display at the Galleries at Moore. The quote is reflective of how Donaty has sought to tell her own story — by painting her body and mind before and after a cancer diagnosis.
In a series of near-mural sized artworks, Donaty depicts herself kneeling, crouched, or otherwise obscured amidst a barrage of colorful, abstract confetti. The subject oscillates between shielding herself from and surrendering to whirling pieces of unruly and often illegible pieces of information: Dollar signs, faded emoticons, uncanny creatures, brusque brushstrokes, stenciled letters.
The color saturation is overwhelming; it’s a clear nod to the atmosphere of warped or false narratives and symbology that we all wade through everyday. In Donaty’s case, the strange markings represent the “code” that Cixous references. Surviving cancer, Donaty seems to say, requires an ability to fight not just abnormal cell growth but the prejudicial bureaucracy, inhuman jargon and other racially and economically charged bullshit contaminating our broken healthcare system.
There is an inspiring arc to Donaty’s narrative. Over time, the images evolve from shots of Donaty defending herself from a looming planetarium of incoherent but hyper-realistic graffiti into less convoluted scenes of the artist standing strong while looser articulations of the so-called “regulations and codes” fall around her, collecting into puddles at her feet.
The culminating portrait shows Donaty baring her breasts and scarred stomach while bracing a traffic mirror in front of her face. She is framed by an army of abstract brushstrokes, but the fisheye reflection draws our attention instead to a sparsely foliaged tree. Donaty, whose body is colored green in this frame, understands herself as an extension of the natural world; the pink background — a color that’s become linked with breast cancer awareness — is superficial and secondary to the subject.
The story Donaty tells is personal and specific, told through her body. The implication is also universal; her artistic interest in unclear markings is, maybe, a commentary on the ways we are each scarred by immaterial culture. We are all bruised, disfigured, damaged goods. Whether through words or colors, "writing oneself," as Cixous puts it, is synonymous to healing.
