Less Information, Better Considered

Tenaglia says of her work: “At a time when information is fast, easy, and overwhelmingly ever-present—yet so often substantially insufficient—these works are deliberately communicating less. Related to how we receive and process information, they are meant to baffle or confound, coaxing a longer look, a slowing down, where less information can be better considered. I am interested in how we group information, creating ‘chunks’ that we associate and store in our memories as coherent groupings. When confronted with partial information, we use our own assumptions, big and small, to complete these fragments. I am looking for a place of contemplation over simple comprehension, prioritizing how things are experienced and interpreted over assigning meaning.”

Tenaglia sees polarities such as representation and abstraction as part of a continuum and refuses to align herself with one approach or the other. She aims to get to the heart of the matter by ignoring categories. You can see meaning as a category of knowledge and knowledge as an interpretation of experience. As an artist, Tenaglia’s after direct experience. That’s why if you cut through the fun and games of figuring things out and trying to know what you’re looking at, one of her pieces might just floor you with the actuality it is communicating.

Daniel Belasco, executive director of the Al Held Foundation, shared a description of his experience of Tenaglia’s installation at the site. The work was part of a show that ended in October put together by Alyson Baker of River Valley Arts Collective. Essentially Belasco said that walking up the hill toward Tenaglia’s installation he first perceived it as a set of disjointed or disassociated personages. As he got closer, the installation’s underlying structure and formal relationships came to the foreground and as he crossed the threshold into the interior of the piece all the noise and dissonances disappeared and harmonized and he experienced a kind of quiet. Having recreated this experience for myself, I can testify that the quiet he referenced was palpable and deeply moving.

Tenaglia imparts that the idea for the installation came out of her experience of the pandemic, which led her and her partner to temporarily relocate closer to her parents in New Jersey. Away from her studio and teaching remotely, she engaged in a photography project: taking pictures of the houses and properties in the neighborhood around her temporary home. Tenaglia says the practice focused her thoughts on “care and neglect, life and death, preservation and inattention, access and denial, foreground and background, real and fake, systems and irregularities—home as a construct.”

Situated in a grove of lovely trees awaiting autumn, the “home” Tenaglia constructed on the hill above Al Held’s studio complex was inside out. Facing outward were totemic figures embellished with ceramic signifiers of domesticity and indeterminacy, framing devices, and quasi-geometric painted references to embodiment, like the ones she included in her installation at Salisbury. Moving over Belasco’s “threshold” to the inside, the roofless and porous enclosure was covered with shingles. A great slab of wood was off center, tabled and leveled, contrasting with the slope of the hill flowing away beneath it and echoing the odd configuration of Held’s storage building across the lawn, which was built into the side of the descending slope.

Tenaglia, who adamantly refrains from titling her individual pieces because she does not want to offer too much information, has surprisingly started giving names to her multipiece installations. The one on the hill at the Al Held Foundation is titled: Untitled (Can’t hold onto it). What is it that can’t be grasped? Don’t know, can’t say (that’s up to the viewer). But perhaps it has something to do with how a work of art framing and simultaneously unframing the clear light of a late afternoon can leave you without words.

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