The April before her program started, Danica, along with a few other students, was invited to the school’s prestigious Tribeca Ball, where she spent the evening surrounded by the glitz of celebrity and fashion and art. In New York for several days, she remembers finding herself in a tiny alley, watching a handful of leaves caught in the chaos of a ceaseless whirlwind. “There was this parallel feeling inside.” Once the masters program began, however, she was grounded, fast and hard. “Your first year is boot camp,” she says. “You’re in classes from nine to six, work until midnight, then you go home and work some more.” She smiles and a shrugs. “It’s stressful.” The summer between first and second years, she was chosen for a residency at the Leipzig International Art Programme, where she spent two months living and working on art in an old, repurposed cotton mill, before returning to school with a new sense of urgency. “Being in New York, it’s such an invigorating, visceral place. You can’t not be propelled by that.” Work on her thesis continued in earnest, as Danica laboured on painting after painting, as well as an eight-foot-wide ballpoint pen drawing. Danica’s hands fly in front of her as she tries to explain why she loves what she does, what she sees, how her work changed while in New York. She stopped painting from life and photographs, turning instead to the depths of her imagination, learned how to focus and “how to squish the spectrum of light into the spectrum of paint.” Her pieces explore the complexities of adolescence, of connection, of that feeling of being an outsider, those “painful,
awkward moments that we all pivot off of.” “I love how in painting something can be two things at once,” she says. “It can fill you up. It can empty you. I don’t necessarily paint things I like.” Rather, she’s pulled to give a voice to things that hurt, or are jarring. Magnificent in their complexity, her canvases hold no playful poppies or soothing seashores to be displayed in a hotel lobby. Her work is visceral, complicated, physical, uncomfortable. She walks a line of contradictions with every stroke of colour: the sublime and the grotesque; intimacy pressed against voyeurism. “That dichotomy between repulsion and attraction is so important to me,” she says. “I walk that line constantly. I want the viewer to feel uncomfortable, to wonder if maybe she shouldn’t be looking.” Now as a Chubb Fellow at the school, Danica has the time and studio space to further explore those relationships and continue unearthing her own voice while mentoring incoming students. The latest development in Danica’s artistic evolution was her Italian debut at the C+N Canepaneri Gallery in Milan, Italy, which ran until April 6. The solo show, “The Ghost I Made You Be,” includes a significant number of her most recent works, the majority of which were created specifically for the exhibit. “The title…comes from a Leonard Cohen lyric from a song called ‘Treaty’ off his final album before he died last year,” she says. “The full line is ‘I’m sorry for the ghost I made you be/only one of us was real and that was me.’ Leonard, a fellow Canadian, has occupied a spot close to my heart for a long time. I think he
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