Dan Cameron
New York, NY
I'm a NYC resident starting in 1979, but I've been making art in my Glens Falls, NY office since late 2018. My medium is collage with mixed media.
Message
I was born 1956 in Utica NY, raised in Hudson Falls, NY, and am a graduate of Hudson Falls High School (1974) and Bennington College (BA, 1979). I made a lot of art from my teenage years until I was in my early thirties, but stopped when my work as a curator began to take up all my available time. I started up again in late 2016, while I was on a residency at the Hermitage Artist Retreat in Englewood, Florida. Because at the time I was also starting to work as an independent curator for the first time in over twenty years, my newfound freedom of activity helped me realize that I'd been wanting to get back to art-making for a long time. It proceeded in fits & starts for a couple of years, with me framing my work for the first time in 2018, and letting a few other people have a look. Everything changed when I rented my Glens Falls space starting in late 2018, because for the first time I had a permanent work-space where I could develop pictures for months at a stretch. I began actively inviting people for studio visits in late 2020, as a result of which I had my first solo exhibition at Lake George Arts Project in June 2021. I have a second exhibition scheduled for The Dime in Chicago in July 2022.
Statement
My collages are composed of fragments of a world that I often barely understand or recognize, but these fragments have caught my attention as I go about sifting through things that curators typically sort through in their famously boundless curiosity. These things invariably belong to the past, often to other places with their own cultures and histories. Photographs, postcards, advertisements, illustrations, exhibition announcements, magazines, textbooks, packaging and other scraps of language and color are culled from sources whose origins are typically obscured, and in many cases either unknown or forgotten. Severed from their original contexts, they are transformed into open, unattached signifiers, which I then re-assemble in an effort to construct a new composite visual reality that makes intuitive sense to me, despite the fact that the precise nature of the outcome is not usually intelligible until quite far along in the process. I often think of them in terms of mosaics, with defined segments of independently articulated colors and textures juxtaposed with layers marked by overlay and continuity. At a certain point, as with an exhibition, the activity in making a collage starts to make its own sense, but only because an emergent reality begins to impose itself on my perception of the work in progress.
Something that’s become clearer to me over the past year is how closely connected my collages are to my curatorial practice, and in particular the specific way I think about art history. The German art historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929) is best known today for having produced hundreds of iconographic charts that link archaic images and forms across the centuries until they evolve into modern renditions of the same visual principles. Warburg was also deeply preoccupied (as am I) with developing a library and archive suitable for his own research. My personal inclination has always been towards ephemera from an age and location recent enough to seem familiar at first, but old enough that its attitudes, words, and symbols are foreign to us today. When I reassemble these fragments into a new composition, the subject of which isn't usually clear to me until at least halfway through the process, I frequently work on vintage samples of paper and cardboard, and often choose second-hand frames rather than new ones, in order to underscore the object’s recycled quality.
In the past year, I’ve begun to appreciate that in my collages I’m doing what most artists do, which is to create an imagined version of the world in order to mentally live inside it, to seek meaning where all kinds of unrelated images constantly flow in, out and around each other, and to set aside the rarest and most intriguing examples for my own compositions.