STATEMENT OF WORK

A death in my family and my ensuing grief changed my experience of time and, in turn, transformed my work. After my uncle died in a plane crash in 2019, I felt trapped in time: my mind could not comprehend this new reality and remained stuck. As I grieved, I was propelled forward (“moving on”), but this “moving on” means that I am inevitably moving further away from him. With each passing day, he grows more distant.

In my work, I wrestle with how he died and how to remain close to him. Each painting is a mindscape; within the confines of the surface, I express how I feel by using images that haunt me. With symbolic imagery, I explore the perception of time, loss, movement, and flight. I make and remake images of birds, planes, angels, numbers, weather patterns, and scientific diagrams as a proxy for tirelessly trying to absorb this loss. In painting, printmaking, video, and sculpture, layering images evokes how time feels both cumulative and circular, piling up as images do.

Phallic and reminiscent of the crucifix, the plane represents technological achievement and the hubris inherent in this advance. In flying, we seek to overcome our humanness; we want to resemble the bird  or the angel. But this attempt is full of danger. “After Bruegel” contextualizes the desire to fly in historical terms: tracings of flying apparatuses imagined by Goya, Edward Muybridge’s photographic study of birds, and drawings of airplanes accrete on the surface. On these collaged vellum drawings, I copied Bruegel’s painting “Fall of Icarus” to link Daniel to Icarus — gravity pulled both to the earth.

I gravitate to these images intuitively, without initially understanding their significance. In remaking and layering them, I realize what they represent to me and how they are related. The numbers 1-7 and 1-24 mark the days of the week and the hours of the day. Drawing these numbers accounts for the growing distance between me and death. This linearity contrasts with diagrams of lunar cycles, which dictate Jewish rituals. In “outstretched”, I combine images of a falcon with Masaccio’s Mary Magdalene to evoke both the human desire to fly and an expression of unhinged grief. In some places information is shrouded, obscured by its own density. In others, images are intelligible, veiled by a wash of color. This spectrum of legibility shows how confusion and clarity coexist when trying to account for loss.My repeated return to these images reflects how, as a result of loss, the mind returns to the same scene to metabolize tragedy and grasp for sense.