Glens Falls Chronicle Serving the Glens Falls/Lake George region; Warren, Washington and northern Saratoga counties since 1980
Chronicle Managing Editor Cathy DeDe urges: Rare opportunity this week to meet rising star artist Daniel Giordano, 36-year old creator of “Crystal Blue Persuasion,” a solo show of memory-driven fantastical sculptures now in the Hyde Collection’s contemporary Feibes & Schmitt Gallery. He’ll give a talk on Thursday, July 18, at 6 p.m. for the museum’s monthy “Hyde After Hours.”
“Mixed media” doesn’t begin to describe Mr. Giordano’s work, here through September 15, previously at MASS MoCA and headed to notable galleries including Grimm in Manhattan.
The materials list on each wall label reads like an exuberant, twisted tone poem: “Acrylic polymer emulsion, aluminum, bald eagle excrement, candied fruit, cattails, ceramic, cicada wing, cow tooth, deep-fried batter, duct tape residue…” is just some of what comes together in his sculpture Study for Brother as Merlin’s Beard.
“I’m having so much fun,” Mr. Giordano tells The Chronicle. “It’s what I did since a kid, just entertaining myself by making scary or freaky or goopy things.
His grandfather and father owned a women’s coat factory in Newburgh, his home town, from the 1950s until 1996: “My playground, growing up,” Mr. Giordano calls it, site of impish childhood antics where now he has his workshop studio. He channels memories of his mother’s and aunt’s life stories, his father and brother, the women who worked the factory all play into the sculptures.
“Everything,” Mr. Giordano says, “whether it’s internal family dysfunction, to the greater environmental issues we’re facing that we’re all seeing right now — or the wall of some kind of disturbing smell the minute I cross the street to the Hyde — they’re under this umbrella term I call ‘the f-cked-up-itudes.’
“But the f-cked-up-itudes are the things that I think I really channel and drive into the work, and it makes the work have this twisted quality to it, on top of the fantastical or the monstrous or the loving.”
“It’s that whole spectrum of emotion and feeling that I’m trying to channel.”
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