These select multimedia works are excerpts from the raw footage used in video installation works. These ideas are presented here when moving images, performance and installation complete the works. I like to use dual video projections where two moving images are presented on screen or in projection within a gallery or site-specific space.
This work is deeply personal. In the weeks before this performance was filmed it had become clear that my wife and I would soon be divorced. The Standing Box depicts the two of us standing separate, naked, in time, in a box constructed of crude available wood. These recorded moments immediately precede our last days together and subsequent estrangement. Over time I've considered various bodies standing separate. One example is Hans Memling’s Adam and Eve oil on oak (1485). Another is Robert Morris' "Box for Standing". These works construct an object and/or instruction to the idea of separation and estrangement. This idea is the spirit of the work and questions the limits of separation between art and life.
12 hour Portrait depicts a studio performance while two video cameras make a time lapse exposure over the course of a day. The work sits somewhere between pleasure and pain as the rising sun floods the studio changing the set and mood. In time, the tenseness is more similar to an execution view after the light crosses the seated form. This piece remains a seminal exploration in the role of performance in picture making.
Dots made with paint in performance with the camera.
Founders Portraits (Turning Antiquities) was first exhibited as a live performance in Prishtina, Kosovo for the event "PRISHTINË-mon amour" (Sept 2012). Working alongside several young artists, participants were asked to create a work on the theme of repetition. The work was then played as a one hour live performance in a unused portion of Prishtina, Kosovo’s largest and most prominent structure and historic landmark the Palace of Youth and Sports (Albanian: Pallati i Rinise dhe Sporteve; Serbian: Палата омладине и спорта/Palata omladine i sporta, formerly named "Boro and Ramiz"). In response to this theme, I built a chair to slowly turn sitters (in this case the other artists and volunteers) who are recorded and in turn presented in rotation on deconstructed lcd screens (pictured below). As a second component to this work I record a 1 hour live performance with a public audience present on the opening night. At the same time as the live performance plays, deconstruced and mounted LCD screens showing the pre-recorded other performers rotating in performance on the chair are present in the exhibition space. The recorded material from the live performance, along with the portraits in rotation, were shown as a secondary exhibition work prepared for future works display. As one critic notes after viewing Me Pix, on of the future showings of the piece at the Rochester Contemporary, "Sound is not present, image is prominent, the drama is understated – we get to experience “real time” in Daniel’s work. Very intriguing is the revolving swivel chair that the performers use during the videos. The artist is forced to change his perspective through the efforts of a hand cranked transmission of power and vision. It is this physical manifestation of a metaphor that is so apt for this show." (Alan Singer Arts | http://singerarts.com/alan/pixture-me/).
The exhibit "in • ter • sect / intər'sekt/" explores how we communicate face-to-face and how technology, minus the human connection, transforms that experience.
in·ter·sect /ˌintərˈsekt/ is an exhibition experience that includes live performance, video, sound and sculpture. The videos and the live performers respond to an audio track of spoken words describing the body. These words, both ordinary and vulgar, reflect on semiotic discourse. They signify specific body parts, as we come into contact with them in different contexts. The merging into a single stream of rhythmically measure spoken descriptors of the body in English and Albanian language both reminds us that these are simply words ascribed meaning from language and that the body politic is complex and nuanced in our social spaces. In this way, the piece aims through its combination of video, performance, sound, and sculptural space to reflect back on the modern landscape of personal communication/interaction and how it is modified through technology.
The individual work was expanded to include an interchange of similar ideas with students at Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis, Indiana. Students were asked to consider the theme and create a similar exchange that explored personal communication/interaction filtered through their chosen electronic media. Over a term we communicated in non-linear and recorded exchanges in culminating the theme. The results were presented in a an exhibition and lectures at the University. in·ter·sect /ˌintərˈsekt/, “a collaborative exhibition exploring parallel processes present in the electronic and physical nature of modern interpersonal relationships. The work develops on themes of shared intimacy and emotional memory.”
