80 Center Street
chatham, NY
MAKE AN APPOINTMENT
DANIEL GIORDANO:
IKNEW YOUR FATHER WHEN HE HAD
COJONES
July 17th -
August 17th
Upstate art weekend hours
July 17-20 2-5pm
Opening Reception
July 19th 5-8 pm
w/ a performance/situation by 181 collective 6-8pm
and by apointment
I Knew Your Father When He Had Cojones is a continuation of the worldbuilding that propels Daniel Giordano’s
practice, one typified by alchemy and ambivalence. The artist’s intuitive and inventive use of organic, synthetic, and
immaterial mediums yields works that are simultaneously vigorous, grotesque, stimulating, and rowdy.
In a new site-specific installation at The Green Lodge, haptics and iconography shift in and out of focus in a buzzy
clamor. Against the gallery’s green exterior, red lights and red gels over the windows induce a visual hum, with senses
heightened by bubbles streaming through the space and the whirring of the industrial fan. The floor is a soft patchwork
of cushions upholstered in fabrics from his studio’s former factory days. Images of balls, skulls, middle fingers, and flies
are laced into a kaleidoscopic doomsday clock with spider legs for hands, all burned into the gallery ceiling and walls.
While phallic and testicular forms recur throughout Giordano’s sculptures and drawings, the work feigns a sophomoric
humor and rather triangulates around something more serious—somewhere between pride and possessiveness, the
unconscious and castration anxiety, the pretense and lore of masculinity. “I knew your father when he had cajones
[sic],” was the backhanded quip—potent with bravado and betrayal—directed at the repo man protagonist in Richard G.
Brown’s 1964 short story Mr. Iscariot.
The exhibition presents a world brimming with gnarly swagger, yet softened by a sense of sincerity, even vulnerability.
Reservoirs of memory are dredged and recast. As if by alchemy, the banal becomes talismanic, and the personal
becomes the stuff of legend.
show details
Daniels CV