ROOM is pleased to announce the solo presentation of new and recent paintings as well as drawings by the artist, Blake Daniels.
Opening Reception: Saturday, 25 March from 16h00 exhibition runs until 22 April 2017.
In TALES OF HERE AND LATER, the paintings presented occupy a visual vocabulary suspended between fact and fiction while playing with contested forms of desire. The artist seeks to question the modes and methods of how we visualize genealogies and experienced narratives. In several of the larger scaled oil works, bodies and spaces are at turn obscured, dislocated and fragmented within the painted surface; as a means of contending with the inherent hybridism that occurs between representation and abstraction as both a tool for formal and social critique.
Daniels elaborates:
‘The central exploration of these tales [has to do with a] feeble calling of a queer way of seeing that indulges in denied pleasure and the erotic power of desire and loss. This is a desire that both dismembers figures, territories and time; in the same breathe as visualising them as new and whole, existing in new worlds remembered not in history but in the body’s desire itself.’
The artist’s inordinate use of colour further enhances this approach; employing a specific palette that summons an ‘unbound Queer Visuality.’
Blake Daniels (b. 1990 Cincinnati, USA) is currently living and working in Johannesburg, South Africa where he is currently pursuing a Masters in Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. Daniels received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2013) where he was a recipient of the Edward L. Ryerson Fellowship for top emerging artists. Other awards include the Post Graduate Merit Award, Johannesburg, ZA (2016) towards his current Masters in Fine Arts, the Pollock Krasner Fellowship, Vermont, USA (2014), the Ox-Bow Fellowship Grant, Saugatuck, USA (2014) and his inclusion as the youngest artist in the publication and project 100 Painters of Tomorrow, London, UK (2014) curated by Kurt Beers. Daniels was also founding team member of ARC Magazine, a Caribbean arts platform, from which he contributed as writer and editor. Daniels has previously exhibited his work throughout the United States, Jamaica, the United Kingdom and South Africa (Challery, Vienna in 2017; The Bag Factory, Johannesburg in 2016 and 2015; Beers London, London in 2015, 2014 and 2013; The Turbine Art Fair, Johannesburg in 2015; Edna Manley College Gallery, Kingston in 2014; 5&J Gallery, Lubbock in 2014; Fresh Exhibitions, Savannah in 2014; Gutstein Gallery, Savannah in 2013; Carousel Projects, Chicago in 2013 and 2012; Sullivan Gallery, Chicago in 2013; South Florida Museum, Bradenton in 2010).
ROOM Space & Projects
Ellis House, Ground Floor
23 Voorhout Street cnr Fourth Street
New Doornfontein
Johannesburg
2094
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