Daniel Wiener

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

Since 2008 my work focuses on fantastical heads and faces. I am drawn to the face as a site of psychological complexity, formal possibility and the incomplete communication that happens when we are face to face. Words have often failed me, and sculpture, a mute physical art made mostly alone, became my chosen medium for that reason. The face, like sculpture, is a physical medium too: thing-like and language-like at once, capable of revelation and concealment simultaneously, subject to misreading in ways that parallel language's own failures. My process maps onto this directly. All of the faces are made by pressing colored epoxy clay into a mold from the back. My physical position is literally behind the face. The physical making correlates nicely to the activity of communication; working hard on the inside so that the outside expresses some of the mess behind the scenes. We feel we can only truly know another person in sustained presence, but the face can also be an obstacle, the paradox of presence. My faces sit inside that paradox. For instance are the mouths longing to speak or just open wide to bellow epithets? Or are the teeth lined up at attention merely standing guard to defend against entry? I have focused on the unruly villains “inside” us. The chaos percolating “behind” the face seeps through to the front in the wall reliefs like "Tangled Logic" but spills out profusely in the "standing faces" like "Polyphony Beyond The Batons Thrust".

Artwork