Hello world!

An Archaeological future Artist:

Daniel Arshmen

Daniel Arsham is an artist, he said that he lives in New York city, in 3019. His grandfather collected art and he was sort of the only person that Daniel knew that had real art. So he thinks his grandfather  had a big influence on his thinking around the appreciation of objects. 

His work ranges from sculpture to painting and experiential type things. His primary focus in sculpture at the current moment, when he was in school, he primarily made paintings. A lot of the earlier paintings that he made were things that depicted structures that he couldn’t yet construct or build, either through lack of physical needs are just like the financial resources to release a project on a larger scale. So painting was a way to invent these ideas through image making. Photography similarly creates a media where the every day can be positioned through the lens of the photographer or the artist. So he found these different ways of using alternate media to convey different ideas.

His early career began actually in stage design. He met Merce Cunningham, the choreographer in 2004. Merce was in the process of creating a new stage work, so Merce asked Daniel to collaborate on that. Daniel was not having studied stage design, not having ever been physically on stage. It was a crash course for Daniel. Not only learning about the mechanics, but in depth study of compressing and expanding time for a viewer over the course of performance later in Daniel’s work. He began to think about how he might do that over a wider period. 

“Can I think about geological time and taking objects from our present, projecting into the future through the material shift?” So things that transform into crystal or volcanic ash. A lot of this work began after Easter Island. It was a series of paintings on the island that was published into an experiential travel book, that movies haunted that contains, with no text, just his impression of the island. The famous Moai statues there and the mystery around them. This idea that archaeology inherently is fiction, and there’s no definitive way of telling those stories because we didn’t exist in that moment. “So can I kind of reverse engineer that idea of archaeology?”

In the section of objects that he has cast in his work. He has always looked for things that were almost icons of themselves. So whether he was showing them in New York or Paris or Tokyo, viewers had a similar kind of global reach. And then things that identified with a particular era, a basketball didn’t exist 250 years ago. It’s like tied to a particular moment in time. In identifying those things, Daniel found that there’s a kind of entrance for people into the work, an initial focal point that many different types of people can approach and then they can think proactively about what these objects mean when they’ve been shifted in material. 

He used the mould making techniques that he had learned in school to create the first sculpture of a camera. But when he came back the next day, the entire thing had collapsed into a pile on the table. So there’s a little bit of experimentation and process. In many cases, it took years of developing these various materials, which all have their own binding elements that hold them together. Daniel wants the works to look like they’re in a state of decay, but he doesn’t want them to continue to do that. So there’s a little bit of almost science and alchemy in the transformation of one object into another. There’s been a lot of writing in relation to his work and some of these exhibitions takes apocalyptic, like pessimistic approach, and he thought it more about a kind of potentiality. It doesn’t matter what happens, these things will become these kinds of archaeological relics in the future. And in thinking that way he thinks there’s a little bit of freedom and lightness, potentially, in the work.