Daniel Turner
For his debut solo exhibition with Hauser & Wirth, New York-based artist Daniel Turner will present works created from salvaged and recontextualized materials extracted from the Oxnard Generating Station, a decommissioned power plant in Oxnard, California. Turner's transformation of remnants from the former electrical plant into a series of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and film echoes a calibrated process of material distillation and site-responsive reflection.
Turner’s focused examination of the properties of alloys has led to large-scale paintings that utilize copper components extracted from the Oxnard site. Once removed, the material was spliced through an intricate milling process into refined copper wools. Subsequently, these wools were methodically burnished into the surface of the canvas, resulting in achromatic veils within his picture planes.
In the sculpture 'Channel Conduit,' a coiled arrangement of materials stripped from the plant's infrastructure, which once facilitated the induction of seawater for temperature regulation, is displayed on the gallery floor.
Turner’s latest film ‘Oxnard Harbor’ features aerial footage captured via drone depicting the vacated generating station. Set against the dramatic backdrop of the Pacific Ocean, the monumental architecture points to the facility’s once substantial production of electricity for the greater Los Angeles region.
Daniel Turner (b. 1983 in Portsmouth, VA; lives and works in New York) is a visual artist working primarily in sculpture involving the creation or manipulation of materials, objects and environments into tactile or atmospheric forms. These forms are often characterized by a specific response to an environment under a controlled set of processes. This approach has enabled Turner to base form on transposition, preserving a sensory link to geographical locations, cultural associations and human contact. These elements are present in former works where an entire waiting room is cast into a series of solid bars, a psychiatric facility burnished to a darkened stain against an exhibition wall, or a cafeteria dissolved across the expanse of a floor.