Daniel Gordon “New Canvas”

Daniel Gordon “New Canvas”

James Fuentes LLC

This event has ended.

James Fuentes presents New Canvas, Daniel Gordon’s inaugural solo exhibition at the gallery.

The work of Daniel Gordon (b. 1980) operates at the intersection of analogue and digital imaging technologies, shifting smoothly between techniques common to the traditional darkroom and those made available through the use of graphics editing programs such as Photoshop. In his pictures, the art historical genre of the still life is made the departure point for formal exercises that link handmade and computer-based processes and materials—the show’s title is a nod to Photoshop’s retention of the term “canvas” for a new document—mapping out a hybridized terrain for photographic practice today.

In a series of mounted photographs, Gordon appropriates images of common still life subjects he finds online (vases, fruits, plants), combining these with forms he produces digitally. Printing the images on paper before cutting them out, the artist assembles a three-dimensional tableau in the studio that he then photographs with an 8x10 large format camera. In this way, Gordon transfers his chosen materials from the online to the corporeal, and from the 2D to the 3D and back again. The resulting pictures recall the still lifes of Cézanne or Matisse as well as German Dadaist collage, inhabiting an ambiguous pictorial space and oscillating between flatness and depth.

Turning away from all-over pattern and collage, a series of inkjet prints on canvas sees Gordon’s practice shift toward more explicitly formal concerns. In these images, the artist’s familiar fruits and vases appear again, though their heightened abstraction now brings color and shape more closely to the fore. Produced via a kind of digital excavation, these compositions are the remainder of a repeated process of peeling away transparent layers in Photoshop. Gordon’s use of simpler form and solid planes of color in these prints turns process perceptible, drawing out the expressive and mark-making capacities of the digital.

Daniel Gordon holds a BA from Bard College and an MFA from Yale School of Art. Recent solo exhibitions include: Hand, Select & Invert Layer, Bolte Lang, Zürich (2016), Switzerland; Shadows, Patterns, Pears, Foam Museum, Amsterdam, NL (2014); and Screen Selections and Still Lifes, Wallspace, New York, NY (2014). He has participated in several major exhibitions, including Greater New York, MoMA P.S. 1, Queens, NY (2010) and New Photography Series, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2009). His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY. The exhibition at James Fuentes is his first with the gallery.

Media

• Painting

ADVERTISE ON NYAB