danpaz

Porcelain, Stoneware, suite of 12 with Cement pillars

small 4”x 3.25”, medium  6”x 4.75”, large “10.5 x “6”

The ceramic and cement towers (lanterns) drew on the history of institutional architecture, industrialized violence, and youth carceral geographies to explore themes of growth and development. The lanterns were fashioned in inverted panopticon cylinders, echoing designs common in U.S. prison architecture. They featured the stark window shapes of the King County youth prison, which was built in 1915 and torn down in 2018 after a new facility was constructed on the same city block. The lanterns were placed on cement pillars that grew throughout the length of the exhibition. The cement was mixed by a northwest company regularly employed in the construction of regional schools, universities, and penal structures.

Installation View at Holding Contemporary in Portland, OR

White oak, coral automotive paint, 6’ H, 24” W, 22” D, 2018

Part of a larger body of work that brings together a constellation of research centering acts of memorializing among divergent histories of South Florida, Lectern at the Former Queer Pier, mimics the original lectern that honors a local philanthropist / developer in Key West. The work considers the tourist economy that emerges from the AIDS crisis in the ‘80s and ‘90s and the incommensurability of loss to the region.

Monogrammed & Embroidered Beach Towels
Suite of 30
30” x 60” each/ 20’ L
2018

Thirty, yellow towels are essential to a larger body of work titled Monument a Surface. The project brings together a constellation of research centering acts of memorializing in divergent histories of South Florida.

“Prepositional Phases” acts as a vernacular underpinning between three affective sites—The AIDS Memorial that is built upon The African Cemetery, and the Pulse Nightclub, site of the June 12, 2016, mass shooting. The towels are monogrammed and embroidered with prepositional phrases meant to locate linguistic attempts at connectivity between sites and ideas.

The towels were made to mourn the loss of 49 lives at The Pulse Nightclub on June 12, 2016.

HD, Video Installation, TRT 15:53min, 2018

In this HD, “stereoscopic” installation, Toward the Mangroves reflects on the legacies of enslavement and forced migration to the United States, both human and non-human. This single-channel video operates bidirectionally, referencing the popularized 3D viewing technology of the mid to late 19th century, with dual formats designed to mimic the perceived experience of human vision. Through the low fi, HD lens, Toward the Mangroves, gestures towards the mangroves of Key West as a place of hiding, of the hidden, and as perceived invasive in the landscape of South Florida.

Photographic Mural, Fired Ceramic Tile, 9’ x 9’, 2018

Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions uses the act of accumulating, casting, and spray-painting mundane objects to index and reflect upon the selective ways that spheres of trauma co-exist—and are consumed in and by the tourist industry—in South Florida. The work is titled after prose by John Donne that explores death, rebirth, and the Elizabethan concept of sickness as a visitation from God (reflecting internal sinfulness).

Video installation, TRT 39:15, 2010-16

From roughly 1915 to 1930, Kodak engaged in a wide range of color processes that would later become their branded Kodachrome three-color process. These first color film tests set the standards for how we understand the interactions between lightness, darkness, shadow, and brightness—standards that continue to influence contemporary image-making practices. In Untitled, Kodak, HD, I read my archival research in the Kodak Eastman archives against my own footage of modern bodies to query the role digital video technologies might have in reorganizing the power dynamics between the camera, the operator, and the subject.

This phase of the project centers on a series of self-directed performances of friends, colleagues, and folx in my BIPOC / LGBTQIA+ community.

This project has transitioned to support the realization of new digital sensor technology capable of registering a wider range of skin tonalities.

pictured: Jovencio de la Paz

Video, TRT 4:41, 2015-16

who says words in my mouth documents a text conversation discussing the complexities of gender and race as filmed and represented in Jennie Livingston’s film Paris is Burning. Exhibition visitors were invited to text "whosayswords" to 41411 and directed to a website to view the work on their mobile devices.

HD VIDEO, TRT 2:32, 2015

Rosalind Blalock, an African American student in Florida’s segregated Lee County school district, was the lead litigant in the 1964 case Blalock v. Lee County Schools, which sought to enforce the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision at the local level. After being denied admission to the all-white Fort Myers High School, Blalock became the central figure in the NAACP’s legal challenge to the district’s segregated school system. Filed on behalf of Blalock and other Black students, the lawsuit ultimately led to a federal court order mandating the desegregation of Lee County schools. The district did not reach “unitary status,” or full compliance with the court order, until 1999.

Florida was among the last states to implement desegregation, and having been born and raised in South Florida, I have felt the enduring effects of anti-integration sentiment. This piece pairs an image of Florida’s tourist-pleasure economies with the soundscape from a 60s radio broadcast reflecting the musical “hits” of the era, as a way to interrogate the relationships between aural transmission, white supremacy, and the history of (de)segregation.

Aired on AcreTV as a “Public Service Announcement”

HD Video, TRT: 1:21, 2013-14

learn how to simulate flying_excerpt is based on a Groupon purchase of flight lessons, advertised on the website as "Learn how to simulate flying.” The work documents the experience of digital flight simulation in Chicago, IL—a rumination on what it means to purchase an educational experience named as a simulation. This piece is part of a larger series that explores the role of empirical evidence in military technoscience and simulation as a process of understanding how close the image is to the "real."

Link to video

Digital Archival Inkjet Prints,
7.25” x 60” (x2) / 9.50” x 60” (x3), 2016

In the history of criminology, evidentiary photography developed alongside eugenics to identify people according to their component parts. Conflating this history with popular advertisements featuring women in 1973, when Roe V. Wade was decided, Salem’s Mute Testimony considers the scrutiny of the so-called criminalized body in the history of portraiture.

Plaster, Resin, 2014

Part of a broader material inquiry that examines simulation and fidelity through cast objects. These works, in conjunction with Untitled, Kodak, HD, highlight the tools and apparatus employed to facilitate image production.

Digital Inkjet Prints , 16"x24", 2015

A commissioned portrait series of the organizer-DJs of Chances Dances commemorating their 10 years of creating queer safe(r) spaces in Chicago. Chances Dances eventually expanded to hosts three funding cycles per year to provide support to local artists and activists impacting the Chicago LGBTQIA community. Curated by Gallery 400 director Lorelei Stewart and artist/curator/educator John Neff. 

Digital, Archival C-Print, Stainless Steel Nails, 44” x 70”, 2015

Performance, Live Telecast, 24hours, 2012

The 24-hour broadcast of Goodbye, Farewell reenacts scenes from the final episode of M*A*S*H, “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen” (1983), as a platform for addressing the racial and gendered gaps existing between the physical spaces of “real” versus televised time. In one space, the artists read scenes from the episode, commonly regarded as the most-watched TV episode in United States history, inviting participants to join in as they pass through. In a separate space above, a live video feed of the reading is installed on the gallery wall, projecting the routinization of closure.

Pictured top: the reading and recording
Pictured below: still from broadcast video

HD Video Simulcast, TRT 5 min, 2014

B-roll is a selection from a larger body of work, Untitled, Kodak, HD, where I film contemporary queers as they work through poses and gestures that, to them, articulate the ideals of their own identity expressions. B-roll transports this work into the space of the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art for their First Friday event, and documents the interactions between me and attendees as I ask them to dance in increasingly slower motion. From the vantage point of the camera's preview thumbnail screen, this video reveals the tools of production to frame the tense, vulnerable, and productive spaces where trust is built on-screen.

HD Video, TRT 1:52, 2013

Part of a larger series exploring the experience of “simulating,” Hurricane documents the process of encountering, purchasing, and weathering a "Hurricane Simulator" found in a rural Midwestern mall. 

SD & HD video, Screening, 5min excerpt from TRT: 11:58, 2016

Named after a collection of Frank O’Hara poems, Lunch Poems is an on-going compilation of assembled images and sound that serve as the basis for easy pleasure to illustrate the simultaneous histories that surround us daily. In record-making, we get to play with, perform in, recall, and use video to function as a necessary burden of proof. Lunch Poems conflates high and low cultural moments that have layers of trauma embedded inside them, always near us, for better, for worse.

Sound Editing/ Mixing: Dan Foley
Overture by Trevor Duncan for La Jetée

Slideshow Installation, Archival Radio Footage, 2012

Fiction Outside is a series of found stills documenting one family's suburban migration and assimilation in the 1970s. The images are curated here to mirror the artist’s grandfather’s original, disorienting sequence by drawing upon the format of the montage and its ability to challenge continuity. Architectural images of Florida are set against images of Long Island interiors to offer a view of how linearity is narrativized and altered in family histories.

Audio Piece, (TRT variable), 2012

While in residence at Harold Arts in Chesterhill, OH., I wanted to have one-on-one conversations about the future. I asked other artists to take a walk with me to a location of their choice so we could talk about the future. Each artist agreed to have their conversation recorded.

I set a date in the future to listen to the recordings. I continue to listen to them now.

Excerpts from conversations were published in Shifter Magazine, edited by Matthew Metzger and Sreshta Rit Premnath.

The issue launched at PS1 in NYC, MOMA, and SFMOMA in Sept 2012.

(pdf)

link to audio

Student work from courses:

Aesthetic Technology
Untitled Photography
Feminist Photographic Practice
Mobility, Visibility, and The Other: Rendering 2D Animation
Media in Installation