NYAB Event - Daniel Mort "Obliquity."

Daniel Mort "Obliquity."

Judith Charles Gallery

This event has ended.

Dan Mort creates sculptures that possess their own cryptic and idiosyncratic language. Ranging in degrees of scale and complexity, his work eschews context, content and polemics, favoring instead imagination, the illogical and an innovative, individual approach to making.

Without embracing any particular conceptual program or defining thematic concerns, Mort's lexicon nevertheless manifests itself in surprising and absorbing ways. It could be said that the content of the work does not reside within its form but rather is its form. This form continually oscillates between (and often within) pieces. For the artist, the question of meaning and an artwork's necessity to communicate something is questionable. The location of its meaning is somewhere unspecific, its status undecided.

For his first solo exhibition in New York, the artist has produced a body of work that, beneath its divergent elements, manifests classical notions of abstraction, figuration, the monumental and ornamental. True to his style, Mort's take is typically unconventional - the first moments of recognition of a scene, a proposition, or person, give way to something less intelligible.

His use of found objects combined with hand fabricated elements suggests an essentialist approach to the physical world - his talent for craft does not take precedence over his appropriation of existing objects, somehow fusing disparate parts seamlessly into satisfying wholes. Nothing jars visually, but all remains disturbingly irreducible - or, on the other hand, the whole nexus of disinformation threatens to congeal into sense. Undercutting this compact of the hand-crafted and mass-produced is a very old-fashioned formal sensibility - balance, contained imbalance, a studied weighting of components - which owes more to modernist formal precision than the mannered irrationality of neo-Dada anti-sculptures.

Seductive and infuriating in equal measure, there are numerous in-roads into considering the works deferred and conflicting narratives, but, ultimately, meanings weave in and out, temporarily adhering to the objects but never fully 'congealing' into sense. Or, rather, multiple readings co-exist, contradict each other and leave you in perpetual anticipation of the point of arrival, without offering any comprehensible resolution. Individually and en-masse the works willfully entertain these problematic modes of viewing and comprehending.

[Image: "192 minutes" (2010) Plastazote, wooden ruler, cassette boxes, paint, graphite 10.75 x 13.5 x 6 in.]