“Dan Finsel’s strange, complex videos, drawings and sculptures offer a glimpse of the psychological and social machinations that comprise our identities. He plumbs the often fraught relationship we have with our own bodies to create work that echoes in the mind long after you leave the gallery.” – Kris Kuramitsu, Deputy Director and Senior Curator, The Mistake Room
Dan Finsel, along with his videos, objects, and installations, exist as documents of what is centrally a literary practice. He, his personage, and the subsequent physical objects, chronicle the biography and psychological alterations made of and to his self. Influenced by the subjective exercises and self-mythologizing phenomena within method acting and the practice of the pseudonym within literature, Dan Finsel performs/deforms himself within a mirror of performed identity. Attempting to conjoin the psychological gap between art and life on a personal level and to analyze the relationship between the construction of the subject and the subject as performance.
Dan Finsel was born in 1982 in Lehighton, Pennsylvania, and lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He has exhibited internationally at venues including the Benaki Museum, Athens (2015); the MAC/VAL Museum, Paris (2015); CAPC, musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, France (2014); the IAC, Institut d’art contemporain, Lyon (2013) and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012). His recent solo exhibitions include Affective Memory Drawings at Ramiken Crucible, NY (2015); Introduction to Affective Memory Work: the Cage; Classical Conditioning, the Animal Exercise (Cat in Heat), the Man-Maker, Sense Memory, and Representing the Representation of Representing the Representation of Representing the Representation of…of Production (Part 1), Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles (2015); Becoming Her, for Him, for He: Becoming Him, for Her, for She (Becoming Me, for Me, for Me) at CAPC, musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, France (2014); and E-THAY INWARD-YAY OURNEY-JAY at Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles (2013).
