Essays
Dr. Kevin Richards, Chair of the Department of Graduate Studies, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA, August 2025
Deanna’s practice combines a two-pronged stratagem of material exploration and intellectual investigation, using these methods to raise questions about memory and experience, not only personal but also cultural memory and experience. In terms of process, she looks to how everyday materials, wire, paper, string, and other items may be pushed and transformed into something that evokes and provokes associations with natural forms as well as forms that abstract or try to envision what lies beyond our vision, touching on the microcosmic and worlds within worlds, the spatial logic of a dream.
She utilizes the speculative space of art to pose questions, pondering whether paintings can dream of an escape from their two-dimensional world, of how to have a viewer slip from reality and into a dream and back again, and how to envision the workings of neurons and other phenomena that strain the limits of representation, while simultaneously providing the very structures of possibility for such phenomena.
Her work ponders whether one can be in two places at once, past and present or present and future, questioning what it would look like to be in two places at the same time or being two times at the same place and can the psychic reverberations of trauma be felt and communicated over the course of generations. In the midst of these quandaries, her work explores memory and memorial, connecting through materials and processes with not only familiar familial generations of the past, but also with artists from the past, as she negotiates her own narrative of raveling and unravelling worlds that have been woven by others generations before.
On the edge of consciousness, her abstractions probe realms only on the cusp of consciousness, both above and below, the hinge of consciousness, a transformation of conscious reality through another screen or lens, just as her everyday materials slip from recognition to abstraction, on the verge of recognition, as only art can do.
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Emma Macchiarini, Mountain Metalworks, Asheville, NC
Deanna Chilian’s abstract paintings are primarily oil and mixed media on canvas and panel. Her work is vivid and clean, yet contains areas of intense interaction and vibrant, often emotional, clashing. These conjunction spaces don’t suffer from muddiness or overpainting. A freshness is palpable in her work and belies the intense amount of labor and time put into each piece.
Her process is contemplative and her paintings often explore a desire for belonging and themes of connection through nature, music or literature. Chilian’s paternal grandparents were part of the Armenian diaspora fleeing Turkey in the early 20th century, and her father emigrated to the US in the 1950s. People of a diaspora and their children often struggle with questions of connection and belonging: the trauma of being uprooted carries on through the lineage. A remembering of what once was or perhaps has never been.
Chilian’s works translate this longing into a visual language of inquiry and discovery. Her efforts are singularly successful because they are bold, colorful, and often filled with gestural strokes. She slashes and scratches symbols and patterns, offsetting them with swaths of rich color. Her work vibrates and alternates between tension and release created by these interactions on the canvas. She suggests a sense of liminal spaces within an interior or exterior context, without ever landing on the representational. Even in this rangey world without much specificity you can feel the artist beckoning the viewer to take the time to connect.
Leaving behind the workaday world of the intellectual and the concrete, Chilian invites us to meet in a place void of guideposts. The question of what or where looms over each canvas, inviting the viewer to contemplate shapes and forms as if they were actual references; plants, landscapes, toasters, or cats. The color fields present as forces of nature, like wind or sky, without promising to become that which they reference.
She works us into her weave, interested in the unseen and unspoken, only to change tack mid painting, and plunge into the interest of the play between light and shadow animating a fern, a song, a memory, a feeling. Building upon an innate sense for color and composition, the tension between structure and chaos is really the central element of the work.
The resulting paintings reflect her personal investigation and an inner journey of evolution. In a world that often feels relentless and polarized, she asks us to pause and allow ourselves to be drawn into the questions.