very very very — Ioana Dragomir

Ioana Dragomir

very very very, 2026

presented as a solo exhibition at Forest City Gallery
photo credits: Anahi Gonzalez
accompanying text available soon

Virginia Woolf was a writer, Vita Sackville-West was too, and Vanessa Bell was an artist. You can find their letters and diaries on the internet. You can peer into their homes! Virginia and Vita wrote novels but they also wrote to each other. They called each other “dearest creature” and “pig” and “you angel” and Virginia really liked Vita’s legs. Vanessa painted canvases but also the tiles around her fireplace and the backs of chairs and Virginia’s face again and again and again.

I have been hungrily consuming this content. In very very very, I question the lack of privacy afforded to these artistic figures and the way I, too (I, especially), have been a voyeur and invaded it. The exhibition includes drawings of photos from Virginia’s albums where her face denies the camera by being over-exposed or in shadow or turned away. A text collaged from letters between Virginia and Vita scrolls along the gallery’s baseboards. Their letters, rubbed clean of page numbers and unbound from their order, rest on a stack of quilts inspired by Charleston House, where Vanessa lived.

Two privacy screens (one for kissing, one for lying down), provide cursory cover for you. They are studded with pockets full of things you can’t quite see. Everything has a back-side and a front-side. The front is public-facing and prepared and the backside is soft and vulnerable like a turtle’s belly. Think of someone wearing a shirt inside-out, seams exposed. Think of a postcard with its generic front and I-miss-you-back.

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turned pine/cedar/cherry, muslin, steel, pockets with postcards in them, earrings, pearls (fake), graphite, silk, oyster shells, found chair frame, dress I made five years ago, second-hand books (some altered), bees covered in wax, three cotton quilts (one smocked), five vases each 9.5” tall, rigid insulation foam, manila paper with drawings and pressed hydrangea blossoms, four framed drawings {graphite on paper, stickers, CMYK photo lithographs}
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Thanks to Christy Kunitzky for help mounting this exhibition. Thanks to Ruth Skinner for writing a beautiful text. Thanks to Maxwell Hyett for making everything work out.

You asked me to write a story for you. On the peaks of mountains and beside green lakes, I am writing it for you. // You see, this world was once whole and complete, and then some inner cataclysm burst into pieces. All the centuries lit up, the past expressive, articulate, not dumb and forgotten. It exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can’t cross. And so up to the wildest islands, where the seals bark and the old women croon over corpses of drowned men. // How odd it is – the effect geography has on the mind! I widen my landscape. Ideas come to me so fast that they trip over each other and I lose them before I can put salt on their tails: all fire and legs and beautiful plunging ways like young horses. Certain words – perhaps ordinary words – start up out of the page like partridges out of a turnip field, getting a new value, a new surprise. // I looked wistfully to the left. There is no longer any room for merely purple poetry; only for the prosaic. After all, what is a lovely phrase? One that has mopped up as much Truth as it can hold. A will o’ the wisp that lets itself be caught. // My story I fear is but a crazy affair. And looks like a sonnet. “Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.” We come away shaking the pearls out of our shoes.