Delphine Hennelly + Mickey Mackenna

Projet Pangée is pleased to present Delphine Hennelly + Mickey Mackenna. In this duo exhibition, each artist engages the line as a means of witnessing, processing and recording. The playfulness of Hennelly’s palette and the vitality of Mackenna’s dancer-like sculptures act as seductive entrapments, offering precarious moments of stillness in which we are constantly reminded of their eventual rupture.

In Mickey Mackenna’s sculptural practice, reduced, abstracted shapes converge in a play of lines where tensions between materials and the fragility of their construction serve as manifestations of selfhood. Our behaviour, our identity-consciousness, can after all be communicated through the collision of action and form. For Mackenna, this idea translates into an array of sculptural gestures (groom, press, bend, rip, bandage, scratch, hold...), drawn from her desire to make even the most visceral properties of a material both visible and palpable. The simple points of contact between materials like various types of wood, alabaster, shell or steel become amplified through a balance of line, weight and space, performing as surrogates of human experience.

Like Mackenna, the line in Delphine Hennelly’s painterly approach is used as a compositional tool, but also as
a means to break and destabilize the linear narrative. By replacing thread with icing-like brushstrokes, the artist recalls the tapestry, which frays, wears or tears over time. Her ability to transcend this decorative and ornamental language surpasses the visual spectacle to subvert the iconography of its singular contextual meaning, while retaining the power of the iconic image. With allusions to the lenticular or the pixelated, Hennelly’s paintings slowly reveal our collective desire to mask and unmask experiences of anxiety, which derive from the social and political events that shape our contemporary world. The overall effect is a sense of displacement mired in beauty.

Materials and lines serve as anchors for self-clarification in Mackenna’s work, while images and lines in Hennelly’s paintings tend to blur and break into a multiplicity of interpretations. Delphine Hennelly + Mickey Mackenna offers
a space where both series, subjected to construction and arrangement, overlap and unfold layers of intrinsic tension.