Danielle C. Wyckoff: Incantations

Danielle C. Wyckoff’s exhibition “Incantations” featured drawings and paintings on paper as well as her interactive performance “A Prayer, A Wish, A Spell for Those You Carry” during the show’s opening reception.

Danielle C. Wyckoff’s artwork explores love and language.  In describing her work, she says that “each project I pursue iterates what it is to love. Furthermore, each project suggests an experience of immersion, a sensation evocative of love, often comparing such a sensation to being in water or drawing from certain properties of the element.  To explore, represent, and further entangle us within this conceptual framework, I create installations, prints, drawings, sculptures, and videos as well as collect stories about love from those willing to share.”

“My projects acknowledge and elicit the shifting natures of love and water, their beauty and breathlessness, their terror and transience.  My work relishes in the individual experience, but simultaneously reveals that what we think matters most is truly what matters least: The “I” and “you” of “I love you.”

These themes were explored in “Incantations” through drawings and paintings, as well as a performance in which visitors to the gallery were invited to sit with the artist and describe “who or what they carry with them, or in other words, for/about whom or what they care.”  The artist and the guest created a small vessel which carried the wishes they have for their chosen loved ones.

In describing this show, Wyckoff stated that “an incantation, the use of language to call forth usually something greater than ourselves, is often chanted to seek protection for that which is precious to someone.”

“This exhibition as a whole and in the individual parts serve as just such a call. With each piece, I consider language—actual language or a loose reference to writing—and how I cling to it as a means to protect what I love: my family, my community of known and yet-to-be met people (human and non-human), and our shared land.”

Originally from the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia, Danielle C. Wyckoff currently lives and works in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  She is an artist and an educator, teaching at Kendall College of Art and Design.  Considering the human capacity to love and how we speak about those loves, Wyckoff’s work explores the myriad ways in which we express and understand such loves. She has exhibited or performed across the United States, in Chile, Denmark, China, and Canada. When possible, she, her husband Nate, and their daughter visit the oceanic Lake Michigan.