A Little Too Much
Review of A Little Too Much
BLINDSIDE, 2024.
Tara Denny, A Little Too Much, installation view 2024. Blindside Gallery. Photo by Sebastian Kainey.
She holds her slender fingers while she muses about perfume—
She notes— a perfume: a type of musk she can recall in the hallway,
She describes it as well rounded…
I look around,
I look on to the clothes wrapped beside her bare legs, she passes with the strongest scent of jasmine.
The only scent is grounded in versions of sweet notes of reality.
- Tara Denny (excerpt from A Little Too Much poem)
Longing invites fantasy. It stirs up visions of romantic desires and transports you into a sublime reality. Longing also refuses rationality, persuading us to relish in states of anticipation, never quite moving on nor eclipsing climax. This palpable tension and curiosity led me through Tara Denny’s A Little Too Much and left me contemplating deep desire, tokens of love, and odes to lovers and oneself. Exhibited at Blindside Gallery from the 24th of April until the 18th of May earlier this year, A Little Too Much took the shape of a modest solo exhibition–Denny’s second–which sewed together autobiographical poetry, processes of transformation and temporal signifiers to articulate how we express our love for another. In stark contrast to the fast-paced swipe-right dating apps such as Zoe, Lex and Her, Denny situates us in a temporal dissonance, entrusting us with intimate sapphic keepsakes and romantic verses from across time.
Starkly illuminated by the windows in Blindside’s second gallery space, I’m greeted by two bronze Calla lilies. One contained within an angular patinated copper casing, and the other rooted by thin leather straps. While the materiality of Lilies (2024) suggests the sanctity of religious iconography or the embodiment of class opulence, their lack of refined detail and subsequent visual liquefaction alludes to the transfigurative nature of bronze–shapeshifting between states to embody a new form. Similarly, Calla lilies are emblematic of fertility and death, echoing cycles of transformation or rebirth. Although the guise of permanency in Lilies can be read as a keepsake and gesture of unwavering love, its material and symbolism are suggestive of queer transformation. Lilies (2024) visualises the constant slippery identities and metamorphic qualities of the queer body in flux.
Tara Denny, A Little Too Much, installation view 2024. Blindside Gallery. Photo by Sebastian Kainey
Beyond the lilies sat another twin copper casing. In its corner, the glow of the green-hued patina reflected off the curves of a bronze clamshell. Laying on black leather scraps, the clamshell oozed queer codes of dress, indulgence and innuendo. These potent ciphers of desire obscure the necessity to nourish the self rather than another. Through this lens, The scent of remnants (2024) permeates actions of adornment, self-care and pleasure–revealing how we can renew or transform ourselves after loss or heartbreak. When employed in the creation of the self, material signifiers become potent sites for the affirmation of gender and sexuality, communicating a language for the desired and desiring.
Circling back to the entry, I caught a glimmer of my reflection in A Lover’s locket - hair lock (2024), a fiery orange plait pressed between patinated copper and perspex glass. Referencing Victorian-era lovelocks–a practice that saw friends, lovers and relatives twine their hair together as a token of romantic and platonic love–Denny calls attention to the entanglement of burgeoning love and affectionate companionship. The lock also acts as a device to validate, preserve, and console after a romance is over. Essentially, it’s giving Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019). Aside from sapphic desire, the work touches on the rich history of women’s bonding and communication through braiding and craft circles.
Tara Denny, A Little Too Much, installation view 2024. Blindside Gallery. Photo by Sebastian Kainey
Echoing the legacy of the Archaic Greek musician and poet Sappho, Denny translates lived experience into five spoken word poems. Lingering over the exhibition like the scent of a potent perfume (cue Aēsop’s Eidesis Eau de Parfum), Denny recites anecdotes of sapphic longing, loss, shame and past histories. Akin to romantic keepsakes surpassing a dissolved relationship, the sonic notes evaporate leaving behind the physical artworks. A few months later, in her studio at Gertrude Contemporary, Denny tells me her process begins by writing–poetry, prose or diary entries–an entanglement of memoir and fiction texts that tease out personal mythologies and contemplate entropic experiences.
A Little Too Much draws from antiquity, ciphers and women’s oral histories, pulling us into a fantastical reality where entropic experiences of love are imbued into objects of great permanence. Although the artworks together act as fragments or tokens of past relationships, they can also be unpicked and fractured from one another operating as devices to conceal or reveal aspects of one’s deepest desires. Denny’s ability to abstractly and poetically arrange romantic narratives makes her mythologies almost universal, touching on the slippery nature of queer desire and the self.
ARTISTS: Tara Denny