NEW YORK, NY.- Daniel Gordon: Free Transform opening Thursday, April 27th at Kasmin, presents a new series of richly-detailed, large-scale photographic prints alongside the debut of the artist’s three-dimensional vessel sculptures. Spanning the exhibition is the seven-panel Panoramic Still Life (2023), which extends 23 feet in width and functions as a single site-specific installation while allowing for its alternate presentation in individual works or groupings. Pushing the limits of both scale and dimensionality, Gordon expands the viewer’s visual experience to allow for an immersive ambulatory exploration of the exhibition space and, by extension, his constructed universe. As his subjects and objects glitch through multiple mediums, Gordon occasions a slippage that speaks to the camera’s capability to transform as well as document.

Gordon’s continually evolving practice is stimulated by both self-imposed structural and compositional challenges as well as developments in available technologies. His process begins with the collection of found imagery from stock, product, and archival sources, or by taking his own photographs. He then reproduces these images with an inkjet printer before adhering them onto volumetric structures that mimic the original subject’s form and scale. Prioritizing form, color, and surface texture, Gordon arranges his tableaux—described by curator Susan Thompson as “assemblages of image-objects”—and photographs them from a single, frontal vantage point.

Throughout his work, Gordon melds post-production photographic technologies with that of scrupulous craft. However, in an inversion of the contemporary photographic process, the manipulation of color and image happens exclusively prior to the shutter closing on the final artwork, which is then left unaltered. Gordon is as uninterested in distorting reality as he is in depicting it with accuracy or legibility—his scenes are stages for the unfolding of relationships created by the work’s formal elements.




“Free Transform” is an Adobe Photoshop tool that allows users to modify elements of a digital image file by adjusting factors such as scale, skew, and perspective. Gordon uses this tool to metamorphose the multi-directional shadows in the works, which he initially creates by projecting stark directional lighting onto his objects. The images of these shadows are then manipulated digitally through changes to RGB color proportions and saturations before Gordon prints them and inserts them into his tableaux. The conceptual resonance of this tool—the manner in which it invokes a poetic sense of unhindered transformation that can be facilitated by technology—lies at the center of this body of work.

The sculptural works presented in Free Transform differ in scale from their vessel-like cousins, which comparatively are one-sided and produced solely for depiction within his photographic tableaux. These, then, are also his first sculptural creations designed for viewing in the round—an image that has jumped from the page. By bringing photography and sculpture together in the exhibition space, Gordon emphasizes the translation inherent in his practice—how a subject is essentially changed when moved through systems of reproduction and reconstitution. Or, as Thompson goes on to say in her recent essay on the artist’s work, “Gordon’s unselfconscious engagement with the readymade archive that is the internet reflects a contemporary visual landscape in which images have become symbiotic with, rather than merely symbolic of, the physical world.”1

These ambitious formal experiments utilize the genre of still life as a frame for the innovative representation of traditional subject matter. Plants (poppies, white orchids, desert rose), pottery (Aegean amphora, Japanese ikebana bowls, an English stoneware jar) and perishable food (peaches, artichokes, potatoes) act as the inhabitants of meticulously considered spatial constructions that probe the boundaries of painting, sculpture, and photography. While the proportions of Panoramic Still Life (2023) recall the confluence of a classical frieze, Succulents and White Orchid (2023) is split down the middle—equally reminiscent of a glitch in a digital file and the dividing space between two stretched canvases in a painted diptych. Still in others, the pixelation and degradation of the images, rendered in supercharged color, create a contemporary take on post impressionist and fauvist painting of the 20th century. As if by wizardry, Gordon coheres these compositional modes from the very expanse of the visual universe.

Daniel Gordon (b. 1980) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He is known for photography and sculpture that employ appropriation and reproduction in order to question the nature of the image-object relationship. Gordon holds a BA from Bard College and an MFA from the Yale School of Art. Solo exhibitions include: Daniel Gordon on the Greenway, Rose Kennedy Greenway, Boston, MA (2021-22); Green Apples and Boots, Huxley-Parlor Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2021); Hue and Saturate, Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX (2019); and Shadows, Patterns, Pears, Foam Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2014). He has participated in several additional museum exhibitions, including Cut! Paper Play in Contemporary Photography, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Secondhand, Pier 24, San Francisco (2016); Greater New York, MoMA P.S. 1, Queens, New York (2010); and New Photography Series, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2009). His work is included in prominent collections worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Pier 24, San Francisco; Foam Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; and the VandenBroek Foundation, Lisse, Netherlands. Gordon’s most comprehensive monograph to date, New Canvas, was published by Chose Commune in 2022. In 2023, Gordon was included in Vitamin C+: Collage in Contemporary Art, a comprehensive survey of contemporary artists whose practices demonstrate the wide-ranging possibilities of collage today.Additional publications of the artist’s work include Houseplants (Aperture, 2019), Spaces, Faces, Tables and Legs (OSP, 2018), Intermissions (OSP, 2017), Still Life with Onions and Mackerel (OSP, 2014), Still Lifes, Portraits, and Parts (Mörel, 2013), Flowers and Shadows (Onestar Press, 2011), and Flying Pictures (powerHouse Books, 2009).

The exhibition will end on June 3rd, 2023.