I erect sculptures that are categorized into veins of work. Each focuses on a distinctive narrative, material makeup, procedure, and form. My work draws from my passion for tennis, my family's former coat manufacturing enterprise, and the dysfunctional home life I experienced with my older brother and hoarder parents in a one-bedroom apartment all situated in the City of Newburgh, NY. I glamorize notions of Italian-American culture, embellished imaginings of loved ones, facets of my post-industrial hometown, and more through the use of diverse yet specific materials that make up an index to my memories and converge into multifaceted vignettes.
My work ranges from intimate objects to large-scale constructions. I cull materials that have fascinated me since I was a child, such as discarded “clinker” bricks, deer bones, and water caltrops that are present in my local ecosystem. Once I stockpile these elements into my workspace, I often combine them with carved wood, ceramic, and cast aluminum components that I produce en masse. The results are portraits that embody everything that is meaningful to me. I fashion unique tools, invent procedures, and decadently apply surface treatments derived from substances that relate to the body, such as lipstick, hosiery, marzipan, and urinal cake. For me, these materials evoke specific associations, which I immortalize with a thorough drenching of various resins and sealants.
I play with color combinations, experiment with textures, and explore the ways light reacts to the various surfaces, accentuating each objects' balletic form. I subscribe to Jasper Johns’ idea of taking an object, doing something to it and then doing something else to it. These works are imbued with the full spectrum of emotions I experience throughout the production process. I consider a sculpture complete when it holds a commanding presence.
In tandem with my sculptural output, I’ve always made playful works on paper with graphite, pen and ink, watercolor, collage, and more. They exist in a realm that the sculptures do not, creating dreamlike scenes with motifs often inspired by tender observations, sex organs, the notion of time, skulls, houseflies, sunlight, or a memorable film scene. Whether it's my fastidious hand cut collages, drawing with lipstick, the sexiest material of them all, agitating the paper pulp around a drawn image to yield a fuzzy dimensional texture, or making observational ink drawings in the rain as a treatment to warp the paper and bleed the image, my personal hand is the end result.
Daniel Giordano (b. 1988, Poughkeepsie, NY) is an artist based in Newburgh, NY. Daniel earned his MFA from the University of Delaware in 2016 and his BBA from Pace University in 2011. He participated in the Millay Arts Core Residency Program in 2024, the AIM Fellowship at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in 2021, and EmergeNYC fellowship, Hemispheric Institution of Performance and Politics at NYU in 2015. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Fish Island Gallery, Fish Island, CT; The Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, NY (2024); MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2023); Turley Gallery, Hudson, NY (2023); JDJ, New York, NY (2023); Ann Street Gallery, Safe Harbors of the Hudson, Newburgh, NY (2022); the Rosenberg Gallery, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY (2020); Wil Aballe Art Projects, BC, Canada (2019), among others. Daniel’s work has been included in group exhibitions at High Noon, New York, NY (2024); Grimm, New York, NY (2024); The Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Bronx, NY (2024); Helena Anrather, New York, NY (2023); The Hyde Collection, Glens Falls, NY (2022); The Dorsky Museum, SUNY New Paltz, NY (2022); Fortnight Institute, New York, NY (2022); CLEA RSKY Offsite Project, LeRoy Neiman Gallery, Columbia University, New York, NY (2022); Zürcher Gallery, New York, NY (2022); Fridman Gallery, New York, NY (2022); Barns Art Center, East Fishkill, NY (2021); and JDJ, New York, NY (2021), among others. He is the recipient of the NYSCA Individual Artist Grant, via The Hyde Collection, New York, NY (2023); the Individual Artist Commission Grant, Arts Mid-Hudson, Kingston, NY (2022); A. Gray Magness Award, University of Delaware, Newark, DE (2015); and The Alan Greenhalgh/Laura Gurton Award, Woodstock Artist Association and Museum, (WAAM) Woodstock, NY (2014). Daniel, his exhibitions, and works have been featured in The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, Sculpture Magazine, Cultured Magazine, Upstate Diary, Two Coats of Paint, and White Hot Magazine, among others. His work in the collection of The Bunker Artspace, Beth Rudin DeWoody, West Palm Beach, FL.
“His sculptures speak of apocalypse and decadence, flushed with the impishness that is vital to surviving chaos, even reveling in it.”
“His work is startling, he negotiates issues of taste with nonchalance, allowing high culture to mix easily with the popular and the mundane.”
“That Giordano confronts us with such a visual no-holds-barred screed of who he is can help us awaken to who we are as human beings.”
“Giordano’s delirious tinkering with the glory and gore of his free-style mashups produces an extravaganza all its own.”
“The details are strangely specific, as in dreams, which is due to the care the artist gives to the long multistage process that each piece demands; casting, varnishing, baking, soaking, drying, plating, gilding, and more. Each step tweaks the whole into a category specific to the artist, while it further nudges the created form towards absurdity, or perhaps the sublime.”