Dan Peterman
19 Sep - 18 Nov 2006
Dan Peterman
Adaptations
Dan Peterman’s work insistently explores the intersection of art and ecology. He employs a wide variety of strategies for developing projects and installations that include social and economic considerations and an array of ecologically complicated material and situational choices. While not overly didactic or prescriptive, his work touches upon the complex linkages of cause and effect, fluctuating values, material transformations and our evolving attempts to make sense of our material impact on the world.
In Adaptations Peterman presents a series of object and material explorations using plastics, metals, mud, tape, artificial turf, felt, and found objects. These pieces, mostly small installations, reveal shifting layers of meaning and intentions. They highlight the complicated relationship we humans have with our material world. “We are constantly adapting ourselves to changing external circumstances while adjusting the values that we assign to things and situations around us.” says Peterman. ”This is an effort to make sense of things. It is both comical and enlightening and like looking at any organism in the context of their environment, it is deeply ecological.''
In this exhibition, Peterman combines both chance occurance, including references to the recent destruction of his studio due to fire and the natural processes of a species of insect that builds its small compartmented apartment of mud, with deliberate decisions of fabrication and exhibition. Free form plastic extrusions and open-cast aluminum objects highlight matter in fluid molten transformation: form emerging from formless mass...little worlds being built. The title of one series of aluminum castings, Things That Were are Things Again refers literally to the process of melting and recasting scrap and cast-away aluminum objects, but also to a more complicated process of seeking definition, semiotic meaning and utility. A pragmatic recycling exercise gives us a regenerated set of forms but leaves the consequences open to question.
Adaptive abilities of Peterman and others are further questioned in an installation of brightly colored tape balls, the auto-therapeutic production of an acquaintance of Peterman’s who as an outsider artist/ ecologist, recycles paper and tape into “useful and educational kick-balls” that exemplify the gospel of recycling and reuse down to the last worthless scrap. The kick-balls are displayed on a remnant of artificial turf from a past installation of Martin Kippenberger’s The Happy End of Kafka’s Amerika. A piece entitled 90 degree rotation of Communal Kitchen Shelf combines a recovered fragment of Peterman’s post-fire building with an accidentally spilled, dough-like blob of plastic. In both pieces, lines of responsibility, intentionality, and authorship are blurred.
A running frieze of photos entitled Marking a Zone of Ecological Asylum trace the perimeter of Peterman’s rebuilt studio and the Experimental Station in Chicago. The bright orange cones demarcate actual (contested) terrain but as a repeated arrow-like graphic device perforating the gallery space, the cones focus on the importance, if not primacy, of creating conceptual space in which to seek sanctuary or propose new social and political structures.
For further information or images please contact the gallery.
opening: 16th September, 3 - 6 pm
duration of the exhibition: 19th September until November 18th, 2006
opening hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays 11 - 6 pm
Adaptations
Dan Peterman’s work insistently explores the intersection of art and ecology. He employs a wide variety of strategies for developing projects and installations that include social and economic considerations and an array of ecologically complicated material and situational choices. While not overly didactic or prescriptive, his work touches upon the complex linkages of cause and effect, fluctuating values, material transformations and our evolving attempts to make sense of our material impact on the world.
In Adaptations Peterman presents a series of object and material explorations using plastics, metals, mud, tape, artificial turf, felt, and found objects. These pieces, mostly small installations, reveal shifting layers of meaning and intentions. They highlight the complicated relationship we humans have with our material world. “We are constantly adapting ourselves to changing external circumstances while adjusting the values that we assign to things and situations around us.” says Peterman. ”This is an effort to make sense of things. It is both comical and enlightening and like looking at any organism in the context of their environment, it is deeply ecological.''
In this exhibition, Peterman combines both chance occurance, including references to the recent destruction of his studio due to fire and the natural processes of a species of insect that builds its small compartmented apartment of mud, with deliberate decisions of fabrication and exhibition. Free form plastic extrusions and open-cast aluminum objects highlight matter in fluid molten transformation: form emerging from formless mass...little worlds being built. The title of one series of aluminum castings, Things That Were are Things Again refers literally to the process of melting and recasting scrap and cast-away aluminum objects, but also to a more complicated process of seeking definition, semiotic meaning and utility. A pragmatic recycling exercise gives us a regenerated set of forms but leaves the consequences open to question.
Adaptive abilities of Peterman and others are further questioned in an installation of brightly colored tape balls, the auto-therapeutic production of an acquaintance of Peterman’s who as an outsider artist/ ecologist, recycles paper and tape into “useful and educational kick-balls” that exemplify the gospel of recycling and reuse down to the last worthless scrap. The kick-balls are displayed on a remnant of artificial turf from a past installation of Martin Kippenberger’s The Happy End of Kafka’s Amerika. A piece entitled 90 degree rotation of Communal Kitchen Shelf combines a recovered fragment of Peterman’s post-fire building with an accidentally spilled, dough-like blob of plastic. In both pieces, lines of responsibility, intentionality, and authorship are blurred.
A running frieze of photos entitled Marking a Zone of Ecological Asylum trace the perimeter of Peterman’s rebuilt studio and the Experimental Station in Chicago. The bright orange cones demarcate actual (contested) terrain but as a repeated arrow-like graphic device perforating the gallery space, the cones focus on the importance, if not primacy, of creating conceptual space in which to seek sanctuary or propose new social and political structures.
For further information or images please contact the gallery.
opening: 16th September, 3 - 6 pm
duration of the exhibition: 19th September until November 18th, 2006
opening hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays 11 - 6 pm