Cynthia Daignault: Valley

Baltimore-based artist Cynthia Daignault (b. 1978 in Baltimore) conceives of her work as “long-form painting.” She creates interrelated groupings of impressionistic canvases that are infused with a cinematic sense of narrative unfolding over time.

Daignault disassembles the monumental scale of traditional history painting in her intimate, episodic paintings, which often center on the idea that the American landscape is a witness to history. Throughout, painting is a means to slow down the ceaseless flow of time, to meditate on what to memorialize and remember, and, to capture, according to the artist, “what it means to be alive at a specific moment in time.”

For the ICA, Daignault is creating a monumental, multi-panel installation of an iconic image of the American landscape: the view looking up the Merced River through the sheer granite valley to the sky beyond at Yosemite National Park. Daignault returns to this vista—well-known first through the nineteenth century photographs of Carleton Watkins and paintings of Albert Bierstadt—through the “mediated consciousness” of digital images, to meditate on our urgent and evolving relationship with the American landscape.