Daniel Mirer / Artist Statements & Art Work Descriptions

In The Finest Tradition  |  Architor Space  | Indifferent West

 

Title: In The Finest Tradition
Photographic medium, Color Photographs, Digital “C" Fuji Crystal Archive Print
Dimensions: 30 x 30 in (76.2cm x 76.2cm), 48 x 48 in (121.92 cm x 121.92 cm)  
Portfolio Images:  20 x 24 (50.8cm x 60.96cm)
 

Daniel Mirer: In The Finest Tradition

“In the Finest Tradition” displays my interest in ideas of gender and identity. Among my earliest memories are those of the socially ingrained concepts of identity and maleness. Coming from a male- dominated family, much of my framework of maleness and its manifested psychological constraints that defined how I should be, was for me an absurdity, a one-sided form of inclusiveness of the male construct.

The men within the photographs are performers in an area of identity, a lifestyle. Many of my subjects do not fully embrace the persona of the uniform as masculinity, nor do they reject concepts of role-play. Instead, they step away from the trappings of male code and choose the parts of masculinity that they want to bring into the mainstream. The uniforms these subjects are wearing become extensions of their fulfilled imagination, creating a universe, which they occupy. The images are intended to be of male archetypes, exhibiting extremely masculine roles or career choices showing the pageantry of the uniform as an affirmation of identity.

I photograph these individuals from a direct frontal point of view and within situations that embody possibilities of freedom of political commentary, from the imaginary into the familiar. I am fascinated by the gap between what we are, and what we think identity should be. Through the photographic medium, I collaborate with these individuals that have formed ideal masculine personas.  Using this intimate process, I search for ways to awaken the irony of the male body and elicit the self through the construction of characters.

 


Title: 
ArchitorSpace  
Photographic Installation Project 
Dimensions: 30 x 40 in (76.2cm x 101.6cm) or 40 x 40 in (101.6cm x 101.6cm)  
Color Photographs, Digital “C" Fuji Crystal Archive Print, Framed

The 
“ArchitorSpace” photographs display my specific interest in and fear of the banality of spaces in enclosed areas within post-industrial architecture.  These places are typologies of contemporary post-industrial architectural aesthetic that makes the individual appear so displaced within the uncanny.  The photographic strategy is to purposefully make these images heavy with absence; forgotten places that are entirely familiar. These deserted (non-site) environments reveal no history or functionality.  

The environments depicted within the images are sites that conjure up subconscious memories pointing out the familiarity within the redundancy of postindustrial public architectural space. Tunnels, corridors and lobbies that exist in the images are the enclosed public arenas in which you are viewed and exposed to the scrutiny of others.  They reveal an emptiness that is particularly banal, and commonplace, that has become the current prominent state in the post-industrial society and the spaces that we inhabit.

I photograph these interiors from a direct, frontal point of view, at sufficient distance to include the entire space in its flat and melancholic state where the individual vanishes in the glare of fluorescent light.  These are architectural portraits that become  matter-of-fact, which demonstrates a primary function of the still photographic image, to record a temporal space.  They are spaces in which a room, office or corridor is virtually indistinguishable from another; repetition and redundancy collapse into an architectural singularity.  Within the images, the subjects who otherwise occupy these spaces are engulfed into the void of here-could-be-anywhere, into the monumental dissolution of space and contemporary architecture.

 

TitleIndifferent West  
Photographic Installation Project 
Dimensions: 20 x 20 in (50.8cm x 50.8cm)
Color Photographs, Mounted and Framed



Indifferent West is a photographic series that investigates the western American landscape and its touristic architectural sites. Through this project, I photograph the found and sentimental representations of the mythic frontier and the the center of American iconify. The images are of tourist sites, places that are familiar and cliche but that also cite that lack of a picturesque image of ideal landscape. The photographs represent an America western landscape from the point of view as a toursist. Traveling through place to place of this contemporary American west, sites representing cultural influences where the romantic constructions of land and people through its institutions the perpetuating a mythic West. The results are that the West has become a vast site of touristic ventures where elements of kitsch and consumption about space intersect with the comic. These models developed by private entertainment industries for tourism projecting the notion of an untamed, hostile wilderness, seeming lifeless and void, which becomes raped in myth, attending to what is called the American West. The West had become a place where the Lone Ranger, Marlboro Man, and the Noble Savage, were invented and where they continue to reside in the collective cultural unconscious. The images show a recontextualize of the American west, indifferent to history establishing an American psyche; which has become into a self-referent notion of ambiguity.




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