Dan John Anderson: Relic, Reliquary, Requiem

Night Gallery is proud to present Relic, Reliquary, Requiem, an exhibition of objects by Dan John Anderson. This is the artist’s debut solo show with the gallery.

An undertone of exchange runs through Anderson’s newest body of work; the pragmatism and skill of craft traditions finds dialogue with sculpture’s formalism. A reverence for natural materials (namely wood, and here, redwood and cedar) is reflected by the intense physicality of Anderson’s practice. His process is one of elimination, paring down layers of raw wood until something essential reveals itself, the ritualized intensity of the activity negotiating internal and external space. 

Relic, Reliquary, Requiem is born of a lifelong ethos of communion with nature. Growing up in rural Eastern Washington and now living in Yucca Valley, California, Anderson’s foundational language is experiential, shaped by days spent in sun-bleached expanses of trees, rocks, sand, grass. For Anderson, the sculptural potential of subtraction relates strongly to erosion: natural forces of movement have gradually shaped the desert washes and serrated shorelines of the West Coast that he knows intimately. This influence manifests as subtle patterns and textures that appear as innate as the range of a landscape.   

Anderson’s works seem to stand outside of time, anchored by a corporeal continuity between the two largest sculptures on view. An imposing set of hands, burned and black, reach skyward, either emerging from or sinking into the Earth. Warm-toned stained glass at the center allows traces of light to come through the dark palms. Elsewhere, a head is partially submerged in the ground, its eyes in cast bronze almost glowing with a blank stare. The interrelation between fragments of the body foregrounds an understanding of art as techne—or, as described by the artist, a “thinking with your hands” that melts the sharp distinctions between art and craft, and the activities of the conscious and subconscious mind. 

Among the recognizably figurative forms, gestures toward abstraction offer room for looser interpretation. Collar, 2025 stands tall, monument-like, its central feature holding the striking possibilities of Anderson’s method. A redwood pot evokes the timeless, archetypal quality of a vessel to act as a container for the discrete and disparate, while the encircling web motif suggests nonlinear time. These enigmatic works encourage curiosity in viewers, acknowledging an inevitability of the imagination to operate independently of an artist’s intention. The mind moves, rain indents soil, rocks slide into the ocean.

Erosion is contradictory, at once making and eliminating slow evidence of what’s happened. In Relic, Reliquary, Requiem, Anderson brings a more cosmic but deeply human consideration to this phenomenon—we amount to how we spend our time and where we place our efforts. Everything else falls away. 

-Jayne Pugh