Getting to know Daniel Zeese
Fountain Street Gallery is pleased to introduce our new core member Daniel Zeese. Daniel joined Fountain Street this past September, You can get to know more about his work, studio practice and thought processes in this post!
Daniel Zeese
First, thanks for the welcoming into the Fountain Street family. It has been a bit of a winding road to get here, but it is great to finally have placed myself into a community of artists. That’s something I have been seeking ever since moving to the Boston area. I moved up here nine years ago from from Richmond Virginia when I graduated from art school. I started my Masters in Architecture at the Boston Architectural College. I love the language of architecture because at its root it is about translating your big ideas into something that can be understood in other ways than just seeing the final form.
While completing my degree, I maintained my studio practice at a small scale out of my bedroom. The whole time I was in school I was managing the design studio of a local large scale installation artist and meeting great people along the way. Upon graduating, my artistic practice grew when I fell into my own studio in Somerville. Moving in there, the scale, type, and amount of work I was producing grew.
One of the people I met while working was Mia Cross, a painter who is also a part of the Fountain Street community. We showed together a few times over the year and were lucky enough to have a collaborative show at Sasaki in Watertown, the culmination of which was a great body of shared work and her suggestion that I get involved with Fountain Street.
Currently, I am working on a few bodies of work simultaneously, all rooted in textile. The ideas behind them are:
The stranger, or someone on the fringe of society. They define the least acceptable qualities we allow in society and often define a culture that is celebrated.
The unknown objects. Recognizable forms that we can intuit how to use, where our hands would go and what actions we would take if we were to place them there. Unknowing of the outcome of if we actually put them there.
The moon. It has suggested how to approach time, religion and gender since those concepts have existed. Creating a scenario that changes the shape of it, which change the information it projects back onto us, allows us to check and see if we still buy into all of those things we have always taken to be true.
That last one is a bit of a jump, but I have been lucky enough to score a few residencies that offer me the time and space to explore jumps. All the bodies of work are exploring our perceptions of people and things, and suggest imaginary landscapes that we recognize, allowing us to question things we have always accepted as true.