Christopher Daniels: People Doing Different Things

March 26 – May 1, 2011

numberthirtyfive gallery is pleased to present new works by New York-based artist Christopher Daniels. This is his second exhibition with the gallery.

Within the confines of a rectangle, Christopher Daniels tells stories. In his works, he uses crayons and pencils to illustrate the panorama of paradise lost and found. His compositions consist of impossible landscapes, where the lush tropics coexist with barren deserts, which he lays out in narrow plateaus.

But the landscape is secondary to Daniels’s interest in people - from the grandest stories of their lives to the minutiae of the everyday. They’re part of the background, moving en masse in protest or celebration or they’re part of an even larger story told cryptographically. Often humorous, they present the dichotomy of some ideas alongside philosophical and moral grey areas. The narratives can be as universal and familiar as first love or as specific and strange as the tale of Ted Haggard, whose entire scandal is laid out on the largest canvas.

Where Daniels's large works are predominantly a generalized image of a person created to act out a larger idea, his smaller drawings present figures as intricate sketches of a single person performing a specific act. Taken mostly from the artist’s own photography, these acts range from rummaging through the garbage to riding an elephant to standing around drinking white wine. They are without a story and we encounter them as we would a stranger on the subway. We have no idea about their lives, where they’re going or coming from. All we know is what is unfolding before us. These sights may give us pause, but we then return to our own lives and actions, which blends us right back into the crowd.

Christopher Daniels (b. 1980, Milwaukee) received his BFA from Tyler School of Art in 2003. Most recently he has exhibited at VOLTA NY art fair in 2010 and completed a collaboration with Maharam Digital Projects. He has been selected to participate in VOLTA7 which will be held in Basel, Switzerland summer 201.