Cynthia Daignault

The pure products of America go crazy

March 10 – April 22, 2017

CAPITAL is delighted to present, The pure products of America go crazy, the first solo exhibition by Cynthia Daignault in California. Daignaut’s newest series of paintings are ruminations on the narrative and symbolic possibility of American objects—the things we carry and the things we leave behind.

Throughout her career, Daignault has experimented with the tradition of still-life painting to explore the deeper meaning of inanimate objects. In the title of this show, pulled from a poem by William Carlos Williams, Daignault suggests her methodology is that of the Imagist Poet, a movement in which writers sought to use clear and precise vernacular language— of everyday images and objects—to unearth the profound contained within the seemingly accidental arrangements of prosaic American life. Or as Carlos Williams wrote, “no ideas but in things.”

In the main exhibition space, Daignault has installed a group of tables, onto which she has placed painted still-lives. Recalling a museum collection or yard sale, her assemblages each construct a meditation on this moment in history, less about presenting a didactic thesis and more about constructing an experience of contemporary pathos. There are traces of Broodthaer’s Department of Eagles, Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, and Morandi’s meditative arrangements of bottles, but it is a painting show, and one without any work on the walls. Daignault reorients the viewer’s relationship to painting downward. To view a painting on the wall is to look in or through, the metaphor of the sublime, of window or mirror. To recast the gaze down, Daignault is stressing the inherent object-quality of any painting. It is the metaphor of the earth, of the muddy waters, where to look down is to encounter a reflection of one’s self.

Daignault continues these explorations in the viewing room with her newest project The impalpable sustenance of me from all things. In this series of framed text works, she resurrects the women in her life though lists cataloging the things they carry. The invocation of the purse, a vaginal symbol for Freud, locates the items found within, both banal and highly personal, in inmate proximity to the women, their bodies, their sexuality, the private lives, and in their syntax, to their minds. For this exhibition, Daignault has created a new artist book for this piece, A-Z Volume 5: The Feminine Mystique, which she will release on the occasion of the opening.