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A R T I S T ' S S T A T E M E N T
It is always my hope that the work I create
will speak for itself and not require any sort of treatise to make it
accessible. It is intended to be a visceral experience. I work in relative
isolation and have little interest in what is current or trendy in the
art scene. I do pay attention to historical precedents for what Im
doing and often choose to extend trails blazed by artists whose work
I am drawn to.
I am primarily influenced by the forms,
colors and processes of the natural world. Nature has always been a
miraculous thing to me. I am always amazed by what I see. I love the
sea sailing in particular, I love flowers and gardening. Beauty
is an important element of my work. I want it to be beautiful even if
maybe its a little threatening at the same time.
I am increasingly concerned with the figurative
elements in the work. While that has always been there, I would have
to say that now the work, especially the sculpture, is completely about
the figure in a dream state where forms can merge freely.
I am often asked about the spoon images
in my work. I came to sculpture from a metalsmiths background,
which included working as a flatware designer. One of the first pieces
to attract my attention when I started making sculpture was Giacommettis
Spoon Woman. That piece became the jumping off point for my use of the
spoon as a female allegory.
My techniques and materials are varied.
Whenever possible I prefer to work in bronze for my sculpture. I work
metal in traditional blacksmiths fashion using heat and hammer, forging
and forming the metal as it goes through its own transformation from
hard to soft and back again.
Dan Feldman -2001
My dialogue with ideas relating to the utensil began
in 1984. At the time I was working as a designer for Towle Silversmiths
in Massachusetts. Initially my concerns were limited to the parameters
of function and the esthetics of form. Gradually, I began to introduce
a narrative element into the work as a means of touching on the nature
of utility and what that means in the context of human existence. Tools,
utensils and implements are singular in their identity as human attributes.
That is, we are completely dependent on them for survival. As such they
tie us to the past, our primitive origins, and perhaps to the future
as well. The utensil, as an extension of the body, forms a direct link
between the intellect, the psyche and the external world. It is a primary
communicative device. From an archaeological perspective this notion
of communication extends beyond the mere function of the implement to
a point where it defines culture. Whether one looks at a ritual object
or one of daily use, the form and embellishment are richly imbued with
the history and worldview of its people
Dan Feldman - 1988
Biography
Dan Feldmans
work spans an eclectic range of scale, media and subject matter. He
has exhibited in museums and galleries across the country and is represented
in numerous private collections. Mr. Feldman has worked as a designer
in the flatware industry, as a wax and moldmaker at Tallix art foundry,
as a cabinetmaker, and as a product developer for Pure Madderlake, the
noted floral designers in New York City. He has also worked as a mountain
guide for the National Outdoor Leadership School in Wyoming and spent
two years helping to develop an alternative housing project on Cheyenne
River Indian Reservation in South Dakota. In addition, his research
on sacred mountains in the Four Corners region of the United States,
was published in the book, Mountain Peoples, edited by Michael Tobias.
Mr. Feldman's
designs for flatware have received awards from the American Craft Museum,
the Innovative Design Fund and been featured in the Industrial Design
Annual review.
Mr. Feldmans
formal education includes a Master of Fine Arts degree in metalsmithing
from the State University New York at New Paltz, and a Bachelor of Fine
Arts from Boston University
Solo Exhibitions
2005
Coffey Gallery, Kingston, NY
1997
Hasbrouck House, Stone Ridge, NY.
1994
Donskoj & Co, Kingston, NY.
1993
Stephanie Griffin Gallery, Kingston, NY.
1988
Black Sheep Gallery, Woodstock, NY.
Donskoj & Co., Kingston, NY.
Salon ThÈ La ThÈ, New York.
Group Exhibitions
2005
This is Not an Archive, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College
Annandale, NY
Encaustic Works 2005, Samuel Dorky Museum,
New Paltz, NY
2004
Sculpture, The Pearl Gallery, Stone Ridge, NY
Ships Happen, Donskoj & Co., Kingston, NY
2003
Craft Transformed, Fuller Museum of Art, Brockton, MA
2002
Spring Award, Works on Paper, Bled, Slovenia
2001
Kingston Sculpture Bienniel, Kingston, NY
5 Sculptors, The Inn at Stone Ridge, Stone Ridge, NY
2000
Three Sculptors, Castaways, Woodstock, NY.
The National Small Sculpture Exhibition, Hattiesburg, Mississippi
1999
The Alphabet by 27 Artists, Donskoj & Co., Kingston, NY.
Small Works, Carrie Haddad Gallery, Hudson, NY.
New Work by Five Sculptors, Wild Rose Inn, Woodstock, NY.
Rondout Scuplture Biennial, Kingston, NY.
Body and Soul, Woodstock Artists Association, Woodstock, NY.
1998
Outdoor Sculpture , Kouros Sculpture Center, Ridgefield, CT.
1997
For The Table, Donskoj & Co., Kingston, NY.
Linear Delights, Woodstock Artists' Association,Woodstock, NY.
1995
Idols, Icons and Myth, The Loft, Kingston, NY.
Rondout Sculpture Biennial, Kingston, NY
MIN-UMENTALS, Watermark/Cargo Gallery, Kingston, NY.
1994
Water Works, Elena Zang Gallery, Woodstock, NY
New Art From Kingston NY, Gallery at Park West, Kingston, NY.
1993
Contemporary Landscape Sculpture, Elena Zang Gallery, Woodstock, NY.
Food for Thought, Donskoj & Co., Kingston, NY.
1992
Copper III. Old Pueblo Museum, Tuscon, AZ.
1989
The Object Contemplated, Perkins Gallery, University of Delaware.
The Human Condition, Mid-Hudson Arts & Science Center, Poughkeepsie,
NY.
1987
Silver in Service, Castle Gallery, New Rochelle - Georgia State University
Art Gallery, Atlanta - Bellevue Art Museum, Bellevue, WA.
1986
Color in Context, The College Art Gallery, SUNY New Paltz.
Eighty-Six for Eighty-Six, Steuben Glass, New York
1985
Contemporary Metals USA, Downey Museum of Art, Downey, CA.
Enamels International, Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA.
Emerging Talents, Quadrum Gallery, Boston
Metals Expressions, Joe L. Evans Center for the Crafts, Smithville,
TN.
Designed and Made for Use, American Craft Museum, New York.
1984
Boston University at the Renwick Galleries, Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C.
Statements in Sterling, Lever House, New York
Awards
1986
Honorable Mention, Industrial Design Annual Review.
1985
Innovative Design Fund Award.
American Craft Museum Design Award
1983
Juror's Award, Art of Peace, Fort Collins, Colorado
1980
Tucker Fellowship, Dartmouth College Marcus Heiman Award For Creative
Arts, Dartmouth College.
Reviews
"Work That
One Ups Proteus" by Kathi Norklun
Woodstock Times August 14, 1997
When
are changes made? At what point does grief transmute to joy, apathy
become despair, impetus give way to adventure? In a wink the decision
is made, and what was one hting begins to become another. Can you register
the moment at which the pupa starts to become a butterfly, an acorn
an oak? The turning point, the moment of divergence, slips by.
Dan Feldman has
made the juncture of metamorphosis a central subject in his work. Ten
years of art production, including watercolors, drawings, oil paintings
and the sculpture for which he is better known, are currently on exhibit
at Hasbrouck in Stone Ridge. The slippage from one state to another
is repeatedly evoked.
An image on paper
of a lit candle facing both light and darkness, diagrams the alchemy
for us. The candle one of many instances in Feldman's work, of
a vertical figure cutting through space and somehow catalyzing its transubstantiation
slits the page down the center. On one side of the divided page
is light; on the other, darkness. The border between light and dark
does not, in this case, simply portray a symbolic divide. It is, rather,
a divide that wishes to be crossed as the dark candle, holding
aloft a flame, will so ephemerally do. It is the possibilities, even
the inevitability, of crossing over that fascinate the artist.
Feldman's spoons
are low, round encompassing hollows, much larger than life but still
fulfilling their spoon nature. Until they draw up into their stems:
then, in a wink, the transmutation begins, and what would have been
a spoon handle becomes a green, sprouting thing, an exquisite, voluptuous,
single curl of the blade of a leaf in the space previously reserved
for inert matter. Feldman can play with the visual rhyme of spoon, bulb,
womb, seed; the greenery that sprouts from the cup then, is not arbitrary,
but naturally evocative. But hte incident of change is still startling
that was a spoon, and this is a leaf. The point at which the
change in direction, the decision to become another, is made is usually
marked by the artist in some way, as by a binding, a bandage, a band,
or a ribbon.
Or shovels turn
to feathers, spades to curls, feathers to arrows, arrows to spoons.
In "Wedding," a recent bronze cast to look like a wood carving
on a wood base, aspoon becomes a fork; but the juncture is elaborately
tied, the spoon and the fork handles visibly overlap. The one becomes
the other not by magical transmutation but by conscious grafting, hoping,
perhaps, for a more natural pairing in the future.
Nothing
is quite as it seems in these works; we are less and less sure of our
Platonic ideals of furniture, fork and figure. Some recent pastels show
truncated torsos that seem to be, at their abrupt edges, slipping into
another state. An abstracted brown figure dropping a realistically limned
blue rose in the painting space is less the magician than the ground
from which this Pygmalion rose erupts. During a time when Feldman, who
also designs flatware, was working obsessively on drawings for a simple
archetypal bowl for a customer, he broke from his trance with a series
of mixed-media drawings on brown paper that show bowls, but in an elusive,
unstable state, not the eternal, essential bowl at all. Imagine twinning
the aesthetics of Jim Dine and Odelon Redon: here are simple, mundane
objects, gaping like mouths, circling like events, living like columns.
The bowls take part in an atavistic architecture of idealism;the drawings
look a little like sketches of ancient temples.
Included in the exhibition
are numerous sketches and paintings of the sea, from docile harbours
to threatening shoals. Vertiginous waves curl with the same transformative
power as the blades of green on the sculpture. There on the lawn outside
the restaurant, the change is uplifting and joyful. Here on the wall,
it is dangerous and thrilling. For better or worse, at every moment,
anything could become something else.
"DAN FELDMAN Allegory of
Love" by Beverly Penn
Metalsmith, Summer 1989, Vol. 9 No. 3.
Steeped in historical
and cultural tradition, the utensil is, for Dan Feldman, symbolic of
human need, nurturing and sustenance, healing and alchemy, labor and
struggle, exploitation and many other, more subtle expressions. Fundamental
to each of Feldman's pieces is the potential of the utensil (as an implement)
to shape or somehow control human existence.
The strength of Dan
Feldman's work is its allegorical character. In the strictest literary
sense, allegory employs narrative as a structural vehicle. Within the
visual arts, however, allegorical meaning is deciphered by reading one
text through another, however fragmentary, intermittent or chaotic
their relationship may be. Feldmans sculptures and drawings are
active on many levels simultaneously: his work has meaning linguistically,
stylistically and even psychoanalytically. It is not evaluative or conclusive
but enigmatic and changing.
In Wedding, the two
utensils are a bound pair, their handle-to-handle connection marked
by a tight, stained wrapping. They are, in a sense, bandaged together.
Just barely visible above and below this tourniquet is the flatware
pattern of each piece, which essentially brands them as members of unlike
sets. In his sensitive wrapping, Feldman partially conceals this pattern
that marks their individuality. It is an eloquent reference to the compromise
that unity often requires.
Feldman constructs
his Wedding allegory from codes that are deeply rooted in Western
culture. One can move through Feldmans work as if reading poetry,
looking to nouns and verbs as signposts of meaning. The verbs "to
fork" and "to spoon" contrast male and female sensibilities.
Discerning the fork as a piercing implement and the spoon as a collecting
one furthers this comparison, as does the notion of prodding versus
coddling. In Wedding, the bound fork and spoon are stuck vertically
against an oversized rectangular steel panel (4 feet by 8 feet) that
is painted and patinated. The pair are centered within a smaller more
confining rectangle of lighter value that floats on the larger painted
surface.
Wedding very
successfully capitalizes on a reciprocal relationship between the visual
and the verbal. The word "wedding" floats on the surface of
the piece like an invented shape that is but one part of the sensitive
balance of line, shape and color. In contrast, the utensils become almost
hieroglyphic codes, coyly and mysteriously waiting to be deciphered.
Each aspect, however, also retains its integrity and meaning as a word
or as an object. Choosing which text to read is the joy of discovering
this profoundly beautiful and intelligent piece.
Feldman
moves his objects away from their everydayness and specificity through
his use of allegory. His role as artist is as interpreter of images
already saturated with meaning as he weaves yet another text of information
through the existing one. As a result, the pieces are both satisfyingly
grounded in the essential while they soar sublimely in our imagination
with the magic and pathos of fantasy.
Upcoming Events
September 17 - December 11, 2005
Encaustic Works 2005, Samuel Dorky Museum, New Paltz,
NY
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"Wedding"
"Bowl Series II"
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"Wedding"
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