Daniel Turner Sociology of the trace

Daniel Turner (born 1983 in Portsmouth, Virginia, lives and works in NY) began his career as an artist with monumental paintings on canvas. After studying at the San Francisco Art Institute (2001-2006), he expanded his practice to other mediums, notably sculpture and installations. In 2006 Turner burnt all the paintings that he had produced since 1997 in an action entitled “Burning an Entire Body of Work”. From the ashes of this dramatic gesture, a new body of work emerged that started questioning the notions of temporality, ephemerality, dissolution and transformation by combustion, corrosion and oxidation. He remains fascinated by the subtle marks left by visitors on the floors and walls of art galleries. In these white-cube spaces they materialize the physical encounter between the bodies of the visitors and the space itself. This experience inspired him to develop a series of site-specific wall rubbings using steel wool, recalling mysterious drawings of smoke. His use of industrial materials such as kerosene, charcoal, soot and rust are as many echoes of the significance of his upbringing and of helping his father, a scrap metal merchant, who worked in the city’s industrial dockyards. For a few years now he has made use of abandoned domestic objects such as sinks which he diverts. The viewer has mixed feelings in front of this clinical and poetical austerity. “After an exhibition closes, the work is generally painted over or swept out the door, and then you go on with your life. So it’s just a temporary action, which I think is very much related to painting.”