The American artist Daniel Gordon, born in the 1980's, is a little too old to be a digital native; nevertheless, his photographic practice has expanded as the potential of online image sourcing has grown. Now that a Google image search has become an easy reflex, Gordon's exhibition at BolteLang has an old-fashioned subject, dominated as it is by four large photographic still lives, as well as two wallpaper installations and nine smaller framed Screen Selections (all works 2016), al generated by processes of digital research, sampling and collage.
The largest work, Still Life with Fruit and Ficus, is 151cm tall and 188cm wide, while the other three are in portrait format, all 126cm tall and 101cm wide. Each is the sole document of a set pieced together only for the cameras eye, in which block colors and graphic scribbles brightly frame traditional still-life subjects the artist found online–emblematic ancient clay vessels and symbolically laden perishable fruit, fish and plants. In the background of the aforementioned work, for example, a jagged pattern frames the upper section of the picture, and similar patterns are printed onto paper wrapped around blocks on which sit various jugs, amphora, two pots holding bouquets, gourds and fruit. The still lives offer a lexicon of image presentation and reproduction: some of the objects are propped, cutout flat images; other flat printed things are overshadowed by duplicate prints just behind, destabilizing the edge of the object; while some forms–press for rotting bananas, say–are reconstructed in three dimensions from taped-together prints of pears and bananas. Some shadows fall naturally, confirming the real depth in the staging; others are reworked and reprinted silhouettes–appearing, for example, in Still Life with Oranges, Vessels, and House Plant, as if the shadow were burning through the back of the tableau. The 20 x 25cm camera print clarifies the imperfections of other graphic manipulation at previous stages of the images's construction, such as a pixelated Photoshop selection or the lined grain produced by a defective printhead reproduced on paper props.
Two gallery walls are covered by repeat pattern wallpaper, Zig-Zag in Black and Zig-Zag in Blue respectively. The blocky broken lines, like a cartoon of disrupted transmission, generate movement behind the superficially calm portrait still lifes. Similar jagged forms are found in Screen Selection 11, in which added striations of layers picked up by the computer color selection make the print–while in entirely different media–even more reminiscent of poor television reception. All the Screen Selections, 50 by 40cm min size, are composed of elements digitally culled during Gordon's process of photograph construction and are equally nostalgic, albeit tuning in to the early to mid-twentieth century, with cheery, blunt rhythmic shapes being printed onto canvas, then crisply mounted on aluminum.
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