DANIEL
GORDON
about face
John Hutt: Your latest photo book is titled, Still Lifes, Portraits and Parts. What “parts” do you have in mind?
No way! I like having a body – being connected to earth,
and other people.
Daniel Gordon: The abstract photographs that are made using the constituent parts of older, discarded works.
Your use of colors, especially in “Green Line,” are striking.
Do you intend them to be viewed as a series, or individually? The work is a wall covered in “green line” with the
colors informing each other, or ….
What is the thought process of creating the backgrounds
for each “model”? Do classical form paintings bear an impact on your work?
When making a picture, I’m making a series of formal decisions
that are wordless until I reach a point that feels done. My pictures aren’t based on specific works within art history, though I
am certainly inspired by many artists, past and present.
The portraiture work is disjointed, angular and unsettling.
There is a sense of body dismorphia that makes the viewer
uncomfortable in their own skin. Do you feel that way?
I’m interested in conflict within a work of art. For example,
grotesque vs. beautiful, wholeness vs. fragmentation, or natural vs. unnatural. These are themes at play within my pictures. I think that the human experience encompasses this
range, myself included.
If you could be uploaded into a cloud of nanoparticles and
be formless, but still retain the ability to feel emotions and
create art, would you do it?
Ideally, I’d like them to be viewed both as a series and individually. “The Green Line” is a nickname for a painting by Matisse
of his wife. In the painting there is a green shadow forming a
line down her face. It’s a beautiful painting, one I find inspiring.
When I’m making a show, the color of the individual works are
built and conceived in relationship to one another.
The female forms viewed from multiple angles as one harken back, especially to Picasso, but to cubism, futurism,
dadism and even Haitian traditional art. Am I getting lost
in technicalities?
Yeah, I feel my work is connected to multiple periods of time.
“It is only after you know how to paint that you can forget
how to paint.” You have an MFA from Yale. How much
work and planning is involved in making a piece, or are
they more spontaneous?
When making a picture, I start with a general idea, though the
Portrait by Andrea Blanch.