09-07-2010
Words with the Artist: Daniel Wiener, Part 2
Last week, I talked to Daniel about his inspiration and process. This week we continue talking about his materials, techniques and color.
Jessica Pleasants: A 36"x36" amorphous table top is in the exhibit. Are there other functional uses for the sculpture?
Daniel Wiener: The table originated from my working process. I kneaded a batch of Apoxie-Sculpt, flattened it out, and a pattern emerged. Voila! It became clear to me that this could be a tabletop. Since then I have made vessels, stools, tables and other useful objects. I hope soon to make a throne. While these objects are useful, they share the same sense of impracticality and irrationality as the sculpture. They confuse categories and mess with the notion of utility. For example, the tabletops are horizontal paintings and the wall reliefs comprise both painting and sculpture. They do function, though. Everyday my family uses one of my coffee tables in our living room.
"Flare and Falter", 45 x 50 x 13.5 inches, apoxie-sculpt
JP: Have you created other functional sculptures for other clients/patrons?
DW: Not yet, but I long to collaborate with an architect or designer to create built-ins, a counter, a mantle, or a cabinet. If a client were daring enough I would love to install a site-specific hybrid of a countertop that morphs into a wall relief, a telephone stand mutating into a sculpture, a couch that continues up the wall as a painting.
JP: What is apoxie-sculpt, the material you use for your sculptures?
DW: Apoxie-Sculpt is a two-part material that one can model like clay. Once mixed, it's "live" for three to four hours then leather-hard awhile longer. It dries very hard and can be worked like wood or stone—carved, sawed, sanded. All the sculptures, tables, and wall pieces were made over many sessions working with a quail's egg amount of Apoxie-Sculpt to watermelon-sized quantities.
JP: Is there any concern about toxicity?
DW: According the manufacturer and OSHA, there is very little chance of toxicity. I take normal work-a-day precautions, such as wearing a mask when I am sanding. There is absolutely no danger once Apoxie-Sculpt has hardened.
JP: What other materials do you use?
DW: An artist-in-residence at Pilchuck Glass School several years ago, I produced, with the help of several excellent glass blowers, many sculptural components that I occasionally included in my sculptures. In the past, I used wire, sewn and hand-dyed muslin, plaster, and Sculpey. On rare occasions these materials make their way back into a sculpture.
JP: The works are abstract, which lends a lot to the color. How do you think about color?
DW: While black and white provides an easy hierarchical system—good and bad, life and death, empty and full—color never settles comfortably into a rational system. The symbolic explanations of color are unconvincing whether written by Kandinsky, early Renaissance artists, or post-modernist critics. Color is always contextual and never fixed. If you haven't figured it out yet, I am drawn to the unfixed and the ever-changing and thus drawn to the inevitable irrationality of color.
JP: Paris or Berlin?
DW: I have spent little time in Paris or Berlin. Though I have never been to Barcelona, Catalonian Art Nouveau has influenced me probably more than the art of other European cities.
View a step-by-step process of the making the table: Making the FXFOWLE Table.
Daniel Wiener is a Brooklyn-based artist known primarily for his intense and viscerally arresting sculptures. His exhibition "Watercolors + Sculpture" is on view at FXFOWLE's gallery Monday through Friday 9–5 through September 17th.
by Jessica Pleasants
Jessica Pleasants: A 36"x36" amorphous table top is in the exhibit. Are there other functional uses for the sculpture?
Daniel Wiener: The table originated from my working process. I kneaded a batch of Apoxie-Sculpt, flattened it out, and a pattern emerged. Voila! It became clear to me that this could be a tabletop. Since then I have made vessels, stools, tables and other useful objects. I hope soon to make a throne. While these objects are useful, they share the same sense of impracticality and irrationality as the sculpture. They confuse categories and mess with the notion of utility. For example, the tabletops are horizontal paintings and the wall reliefs comprise both painting and sculpture. They do function, though. Everyday my family uses one of my coffee tables in our living room.
"Flare and Falter", 45 x 50 x 13.5 inches, apoxie-sculptJP: Have you created other functional sculptures for other clients/patrons?
DW: Not yet, but I long to collaborate with an architect or designer to create built-ins, a counter, a mantle, or a cabinet. If a client were daring enough I would love to install a site-specific hybrid of a countertop that morphs into a wall relief, a telephone stand mutating into a sculpture, a couch that continues up the wall as a painting.
JP: What is apoxie-sculpt, the material you use for your sculptures?
DW: Apoxie-Sculpt is a two-part material that one can model like clay. Once mixed, it's "live" for three to four hours then leather-hard awhile longer. It dries very hard and can be worked like wood or stone—carved, sawed, sanded. All the sculptures, tables, and wall pieces were made over many sessions working with a quail's egg amount of Apoxie-Sculpt to watermelon-sized quantities.
JP: Is there any concern about toxicity?
DW: According the manufacturer and OSHA, there is very little chance of toxicity. I take normal work-a-day precautions, such as wearing a mask when I am sanding. There is absolutely no danger once Apoxie-Sculpt has hardened.
JP: What other materials do you use?
DW: An artist-in-residence at Pilchuck Glass School several years ago, I produced, with the help of several excellent glass blowers, many sculptural components that I occasionally included in my sculptures. In the past, I used wire, sewn and hand-dyed muslin, plaster, and Sculpey. On rare occasions these materials make their way back into a sculpture.
JP: The works are abstract, which lends a lot to the color. How do you think about color?
DW: While black and white provides an easy hierarchical system—good and bad, life and death, empty and full—color never settles comfortably into a rational system. The symbolic explanations of color are unconvincing whether written by Kandinsky, early Renaissance artists, or post-modernist critics. Color is always contextual and never fixed. If you haven't figured it out yet, I am drawn to the unfixed and the ever-changing and thus drawn to the inevitable irrationality of color.
JP: Paris or Berlin?
DW: I have spent little time in Paris or Berlin. Though I have never been to Barcelona, Catalonian Art Nouveau has influenced me probably more than the art of other European cities.
View a step-by-step process of the making the table: Making the FXFOWLE Table.
Daniel Wiener is a Brooklyn-based artist known primarily for his intense and viscerally arresting sculptures. His exhibition "Watercolors + Sculpture" is on view at FXFOWLE's gallery Monday through Friday 9–5 through September 17th.
by Jessica Pleasants