Daniel Dallabrida
San Franicisco, CA
A survivor and un bel bugiardo, Daniel tells his story with ceramic and pigment. His noble ruins capture myth and history as fragments of a collective memory.
Message
Like many of his generation, Daniel abandoned his imagined life-path to confront the AIDS epidemic through activism. In 2003, as he was approaching fifty, Daniel initiated his third act. With a move to Italy in pursuit of the art, culture, and language of his heritage, Daniel apprenticed at a Venetian family foundry. He initiated his academic study of art in Florence. In 2011, Daniel received an MFA from California College of the Arts. He has been an artist-in-residence at the University of Oklahoma, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, LASALLE College of the Arts, Fondazione Pistoletto, and Kala Art Institute. His art has been presented in Milan, Rome, Florence, Singapore, Kansas City, Aspen, and San Francisco. Daniel lives and loves with his partner, Deary Duffie, in San Francisco and Tuscany.
Presently, Daniel’s activism is as a storyteller. Ceramics, photography, excavations of history, pigment, myth, and memories of genocide are co-conspirators, fusing to build the backgrounds and characters for the stories he tells. By combining material and story, Daniel creates new means to see the old and uses old methods to discover the new.
Statement
In 1987, I was told I had 18 months to live. Now, after 34 years of not being dead, I want to know why.
I am a survivor. And, I am a story-teller, un bel bugiardo. My research into the survivor's journey takes me back through layers of history to the era of epics and to the materials, techniques, and tales of those times. I create ceramic tablets and artifacts, where the sheer panels between past and present, myth and history, life and death form one universal language. My art offers an opportunity for the viewer to consider their own lives. Starting with seductive and mysterious surfaces, I introduce a place where interior and exterior worlds commingle — where cycles of violation, grief, and communion can find resolution. The complexity and depth of ceramic present a medium where a story can be told in literal and abstract ways. With the materials adding their own vocabulary, my art tells stories for the viewer to uncover.