Daniel Gordon: Orange Sunrise With Flowers, Fruit, and Vessels

Nazarian / Curcio is pleased to announce Orange Sunrise With Flowers, Fruit, and Vessels, an exhibition of new photographs and sculptures by Brooklyn-based artist Daniel Gordon. This will be the artist’s debut exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition’s title serves as a reference to the various objects presented within the exhibition, as well as a nod to the bright sunlight and saturated colors that so often characterize Southern California. 

Consisting of a new series of large-format color photographs rooted in the genre of still-life, the works in the exhibition are displayed as individual images, diptychs, and an immersive triptych spanning over 10 feet in length. Exhibited alongside the photographs are a new group of sculptures that mimic the form of ceramic vessels. Rendered in the round, these vessels bridge the physical gap between object and image which is consistently at play within Gordon’s photographic practice.

While grounded in photography, Gordon’s process makes use of various media in the act of creating his detailed tabletop tableaux - real spaces, made of real objects, that are themselves fabricated out of printed images. Working with specific compositional structures within the confines of the studio, Gordon first mines for images, either finding them in digital or physical archives, and at times, creating his own.  He then prints these images with an inkjet printer and applies the print to an armature that traces the object’s three-dimensional form––mimicking the scale, color, contours, and texture of the flower, fruit or vessel––before photographing his still-life arrangement.

In the process of creating his tableau, Gordon uses analog collage and a variety of digital tools to free his compositions from many of the constraints of the natural world. Shadows are captured with graphic outlines or with unearthly saturation; backgrounds are abruptly split into various colors; and even the objects contained in the works—fruit, flowers, and creatures––shift from their known palette to colors that are alien to us. However, once situated for the camera, no further editing or manipulation occurs, often laying bare the hand-made process of the objects’ making: seams, folds, and the residue of adhesives. The resulting artwork is an unaltered photograph that captures the constructed still-life from a frontal vantage point, completing a transformative process in which images become objects and back again. The final artwork neither distorts reality nor renders it naturalistically. 

Gordon’s dedication to the still-life genre draws on various artistic traditions and commercial applications. The artist’s photographs merge seemingly opposing aesthetics such as the opulence of Dutch still-life painting with the colorful, pop tendencies found in today’s product photography. The saturated colors employed by Matisse, the reductive compositions of Morandi, and Jan Groovers’ painterly approach to photography can all be felt in Gordon’s photographs. However, these influences—and the still-life genre itself—are all just a means to drive formal play within the artist’s pictures. In his recent monograph, New Canvas (Chose Commune, 2022), Gordon states, “I’m actually not particularly interested in still-life; I’m interested in working on compositions. And that’s something that still-life allows me to do [ . . .  ] It’s not about what is pictured, but experimenting with how it is pictured. I’m not interested in the symbolism or meaning of objects, but I’m very interested in playing with visual impact. The meaning is in the looking.”

More recently, the artist has started producing a series of stand alone sculptural vessels informed by a wide range of historical objects that can often only be experienced through image-based documentation. These vessels function quite differently from those in his photographs, however they maintain a specific aesthetic kinship in the use of patchwork collage and the digital degradation of images. Never created for the camera, they are instead designed to be seen and understood as fully three-dimensional forms. Each is handmade by collaging cut photographic paper from an inkjet printer to create its color, pattern, and texture. The vessels are then grouped on large horizontal pedestals within the gallery, recalling museological displays.The unique relationship between  the photographs and sculptural objects underscores the artist’s ongoing interest in how visual information is transformed and manipulated through systems of reproduction. 

Orange Sunrise With Flowers, Fruit, and Vessels makes evident Gordon’s deep commitment to formalist concerns of color, line, shape, pattern and composition. For nearly two decades, the artist has used the medium of photography to probe the line between reality and fiction, object and image, clarity and degradation, and appropriation and authorship. Combining optical illusion, pastiche, sculpture, and various digital and analog processes, Gordon consciously reframes and reinterprets what it means to have a photographic practice today.