Daniel Greenberg
Daniel was born in Baltimore, Maryland and comes from a line of artists. At first resistant to art making, in high school Greenberg invested in a Nikon D70 to take pictures for his myspace page. As a gay male, freshly out of the closet, the Internet offered an opportunity to test his identity through a virtual environment by posting self-portraits and making connections previously unimagined. Greenberg will begin a fine art graduate studies program at Cranbrook in the Fall of 2012.
Website:
cargocollective.com/danielgreenberg/About
Residency Period:
Jun 2012–Aug 2012
Project Statement:
Walking is the best way for me to think. Walking in nature allows for a temporary repositioning from our daily lives. But I more often find myself walking on a city street, or meditating while surfing the internet. For me, both the internet and nature operate as an escape from reality.” says Daniel. Working in the form of block prints, drawings and monoprints, and using imagery found online, Daniel depicts the detail and expansiveness of green forests on or with materials made from wood. He hopes viewers can get lost in the details of the natural world, and at times, utilizes technology as a means to this end.
In the past months I have archived photographs of men in nature from the internet. The men are mostly alone; mostly men I see as beautiful. Certainly, a homosexual gaze enters this work. But by erasing and abstracting the figures I hope the viewer can, for a moment, occupy their bodies, gestures, and perhaps even thoughts. Sometimes I go a step further, extenuating varieties of ugliness in the figures, or at times the impressions of figures left behind in nature. Footprints in snow or mud represent a mark of a person left behind, and a desire to see him. Together, these works investigate not just the the homosexual gaze, but the human desire to see ourselves in others.
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