Dana Bell

Dana Bell’s paintings illuminate great moments of 20^th century cinema, selected with an eye towards classical sensibility, framed with geometric symmetry. From Fellini spectacles to little-known Noir gems, Bell spotlights films that have both strong aesthetic languages and nuanced psychological trends guiding the narrative. Seizing upon this psychology and using it as an apparatus of refining, Bell transforms these distinct, disparate achievements of cinematography. She distills film stills into a shared, formalistic, intentionally limited visual language in which the guiding psychology is both instrument and corpus. While turning the aesthetic identity of her filmic source of its head, Bell’s reductive process reveals the fundamental core of the films cognitive and emotional text.