Daniel Canogar
Small Data
March 27–Apri 26, 2014
bitforms gallery nyc
529 West 20th Street, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10011
View exhibition guide (PDF)
View installation photos
Watch video documentation
bitforms gallery is pleased to announce Small Data, a second solo exhibition in New York with Daniel Canogar. Featuring the premiere of a new series, the exhibit includes nine video projection-mapped objects that are intimate in scale.
Based in Spain, Canogar is renowned internationally for his use of discarded electronic materials in his photography, video, sculpture and installations. Finding inspiration in the archeology of new media, he brings the dead back to life. Secrets contained beyond an object’s surface are revealed, as he constructs portraits of a society and an age. Canogar is also the creator of numerous public art installations, many of them engaging the participation of local communities, such as Waves in Houston, the world’s largest arabesque LED video sculpture; Constelaciones in Madrid at MRío Park, the largest photo mosaic in Europe; and Travesías in Brussels, a commission for the atrium of the European Union Council in 2010.
The process of excavation is central to Canogar’s practice. Works from his new series Small Data are comprised of overhead projections and salvaged devices, such as crushed computers, scanners, printers, old cell phones and hard discs. The artist pulled each item from piles of discarded materials in junkyards and recycling centers—today’s veritable cemeteries for consumer electronics. The found objects are organized on shelves, as if they were fragile remnants of a bygone era. Light seemingly reanimates these abandoned technologies, as video projections are precisely aimed at each object, crafting layered and painterly abstract narratives.
Canogar’s animated installations capture our complex and sometimes ambivalent relationship with consumer electronics. “Buying the latest gadget makes us feel like sophisticated citizens of the digital age. Yet these technologies break down or are rendered obsolete at a fast pace,” says Canogar. Propped on shelves, the decaying technologies of Small Data are presented as contemporary still lives, insidious reminders of our own aging process and inevitable expiration date.
As a collection of objects, Small Data explores the life and death of consumer electronics—and how when we discard our devices, we are throwing out a small part of ourselves. As tools for communication with the outside world, and as repositories for so many of our memories, we acquire a very intimate relationship with the technological devices present in the artworks. Haunted by these pasts, Canogar attempts to reveal the memories, both personal and collective, that seem trapped within, mementos of a time when they had fully functional lives and served us well.
A fully illustrated exhibition guide is available at the gallery and online.
Biography
Daniel Canogar (b. 1964, Madrid) has exhibited widely in Europe and the Americas. His work has been featured at the Reina Sofia Contemporary Art Museum, Madrid; Hamburger Banhof Museum, Berlin; Palacio Velázquez, Madrid; Santa Mónica Art Center, Barcelona; Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio; Alejandro Otero Museum, Caracas; Offenes Kulturhaus Center for Contemporary Art, Linz; Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Borusan Contemporary Museum, Istanbul; American Museum of Natural History, New York; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfallen, Dusseldorf; Second Street Gallery, Charlottesville, Virginia; and the Mattress Factory Museum, Pittsburgh. Solo exhibitions of his work in 2013 include Bildmuseet Museum of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture in Umeå, Sweden; El Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo (EAC), Montevideo, Uruguay; art ON, Istanbul; and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Gas Natural Fenosa in A Coruña, Spain. His touring solo exhibition Quadratura will run through May 11 at the Fundación Telefónica in Lima, Peru.
Canogar holds a MA specializing in photography from New York University and the International Center for Photography, and a BA from Complutense University of Madrid. Publications by Canogar include Ciudades Efímeras: Exposiciones Universales, Espectáculo y Tecnología, Julio Ollero editor, Madrid, 1992; Ingrávidos, Fundación Telefónica, Madrid, 2003; as well as numerous essays on architecture of the image, contemporary photography and new media art.
For images and more information, please visit:
www.bitforms.com
www.vimeopro.com/bitforms/canogar
www.danielcanogar.com
For further details, please contact: info [at] bitforms.com / T +1 212 366 6939
