Daniel Nelson: The Shape of Space to Come
The Emerging Artist Series continues with Daniel Nelson: The Shape of Space to Come
The Emerging Artist Series continues with an exhibit of paintings by Daniel Nelson: The Shape of Space to Come.
Artist Daniel Nelson will be presenting an exhibition of visual art at the Studio @ 620: "The Shape of Space to Come." The body of works on display are intended to examine issues of 
space, in the conventions of painting, as well as to critique the experience of space in contemporary cultural and social experience. Mr. Nelson would like to challenge the viewer to consider his or her own perception of space and to provide her or him with an arena of visual play.
Artist Lecture: October 24, 6–7 pm
The Shape of Space to Come will incorporate a performative component: on the evening of the opening, October 24th, a group of professional local artists, writers, performers, and musicians will collaborate with Mr. Nelson and each other in forming a tangible but improvised artistic space. The purpose of this event will be to make literal the idea that the space between artists - the artistic community - is an integral component to the creative life of any artist, and, by extension, the cultural 
communities that they inhabit. The artists involved will include Timm Mettler, Jeffrey James, Joe McCue, Jon Milton, Paul Burton, with a guest lecture by David Bewley, all of which will be presided over by Studio@620 director Bob Devin Jones. Since Mr. Nelson has made his studio work in an ongoing communication with and influence by the artists involved, he has organized this Happening to create a work using those relationships as an artistic material in themselves. He hopes to stage an unforeseen experience in a spirit of communal creative energy and chance.
Daniel Nelson uses two-dimensional picture-making to explore and critique the psychological experience of man-made public space. The “space” indicated in the exhibition title can be understood in two ways: the exhibited paintings demonstrate a willful period of transition, a raising of bets for the future in spite of a low hand in the present; the spaces that he paints today want to become the spaces that he experiences tomorrow (or vice versa?). Moreover, like any artist, ear ever to the ground, these works assume the pretense of 
forecasting the architectural-ideological weather. Mr. Nelson, false-forecaster and object-maker, closely studies the faux-realities of outmoded science fictions and doomsday street-prophets as well as photoshopped Olympian-political spectacle and economic voodoo in order to position his work in this artificially-lit shadow zone between fiction and reality, polemic and play.
About the artist
Daniel Nelson is an emerging artist who lives and works in New York City. He is currently completing his Master of Fine Arts degree at Hunter College, in Manhattan. His prior education experience includes a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, in 2005, with a concentration in Art History and Philosophy, with a concurrent 
degree from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, also in Philadelphia, where he studied painting and printmaking. He has also studied painting at the Pinellas County Center for the Arts in St. Petersburg, and the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore. Mr. Nelson was the 2003 recipient of the Lewis S. Ware Travel Grant at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, for which he completed nine weeks of travel in Europe whilst studying art history.
In his spare time not spent kicking around the studio or at some day job or other, Daniel writes and goes on extensive travel-adventures throughout the universe that is New York City with his partner in crime.