Announcing: new website and book

I invite you to visit my newly designed, sleeker website ("powered by Livebooks") at www.eddeedaniel.com. The new design is intended to emphasize my Fine Art Photography.

My old website remains as urbanwilderness.net. I've kept it because it contains much more detailed information not only about my ongoing Urban Wilderness Project activities and portfolios, but also about Nicaragua and other projects.

I also want to announce my newest book, Synecdoche: the fragment that represents the whole, which is available from Magcloud.com.

The title, Synecdoche, is a literary device in which the part represents the whole. The photographs in the book are meant to be visual examples of synecdoche. My subjects are the complex, often paradoxical, relationships I see between nature and human civilization. My approach symbolizes the fragmentation we experience all around us.

I am interested in how we perceive nature and its relationship with human impacts upon the land. I focus on how we use natural features in manufactured landscapes to compensate for cultural alienation from nature. Alienation from the natural world creates psychological tension, whether conscious or not. We cope with this tension through symbols of nature: parks, lawns, trees, etc. In my view, these fragments do not simply represent nature; they are the parts that embody the whole.

Synecdoche: the fragment that represents the whole is a second volume from the Synecdoche Series. Both have the same conceptual basis. The images in this newer volume tend to be more refined and abstract than in the earlier volume. Both can be previewed in their entirety online.

And if you're interested, Magcloud is even having a fall sale, going on right now. What a deal!

The Commons III, from Synecdoche

Gallery 2622 opening August 5

Blooms, from the Icon Series

I will be showing selections of my work from two projects, the Icon Series of triptychs and the Reverie Series of photomontages.

The exhibit will be held at Gallery 2622, which, not coincidentally, is located at 2622 North 76th Street in Wauwatosa. The exhibit runs August 5 - 28, 2011.

The opening reception is August 5, 5 - 9 pm.

Artist Statement 

I believe that we live in a world that is fundamentally different than that of previous generations. The land is stressed, the natural processes that sustain life are stressed, and as a result the human species is stressed. Our unavoidable and often unconscious task is to adapt to these unresolved circumstances. My work tries to make sense of the paradoxes inherent in this human condition.

The pieces in this exhibit are drawn from two series.  Each series deals with particular formal considerations as well as subject and meaningful content.  While my work often involves very specific formal structures, form is driven by content, expression and an overall conceptual framework.   

Tower, from the Icon Series

The Icon Series uses the triptych, a recognizable formal structure with historical/cultural resonance, to emphasize iconic themes. The form places a central figure within a context that either magnifies its iconic stature and symbolic meaning or creates an unexpected juxtaposition. The central figure in these constructions is often elevated to iconic status despite its being an otherwise ordinary subject. It is rarely a subject that would be perceived as iconic and therefore it subverts or inverts the accepted definition of an icon. My intention is to invite the viewer to think about the subject and its relationship to its context in a newly symbolic way. Using multiple images emphasizes that our experience of the world is relational and conditional rather than singular and fixed. 

Burn

The images in the Reverie Series are subjective landscapes. They are less about a particular place and more of a meditation or emotional experience. Each is a montage created from multiple photographs. Like the realities I perceive, the facts are blurred: the image is removed from actuality to some dimly seen place between memory and desire, where the landscape is subjective and the intersecting spirits of nature and humanity are suggested.

The meanings are often ambiguous, but they refer to the tensions and narratives of living in an environment that is increasingly compromised or redeemed by our own actions. I am not a dispassionate observer and although the landscape I experience may be beautiful, it is never pristine. This work has been informed by author Bill McKibben’s “The End of Nature,” in which he asserts that nothing on earth is left untouched by human influences, and other ideas of contemporary environmentalists.

But, while they may relate to urgent topical issues, the images are not didactic; they are experiential, symbolic and emotional. My central intent in this work is to express feelings I experience when confronting a particular landscape at a certain time and—paradoxically—to find the universal in the specific place and the eternal in the moment.  

This is work that has not been shown in one place before. Examples from both series can be viewed on my website.

Glass Facade, the Reverie Series