For all their grounding in photography, Gordon’s pieces invite painterly comparisons: his composites are like stripped-down versions of seventeenth-century Dutch tabletop still-lifes, rendered in a Fauvist palette. —Johanna Fateman, The New Yorker

Daniel Gordon is known for photography and sculpture that employs appropriation and reproduction in order to question the nature of the image-object relationship. Melding optical illusion, pastiche, mixed media, and a recalibration of analog processes, Gordon consciously reframes what it means to have a photographic practice.

Gordon's process begins with sourcing found imagery-such as of a vase or a plant-from the internet or by taking pictures with an iPhone. Gordon creates print-outs of these images, which he then cuts and pastes onto a three-dimensional structure that mimics the form and scale of the same vase or plant, thereby reconstructing the depicted object in paper. The resulting objects, albeit seemingly improvised and crudely constructed, are meticulously fabricated. Gordon then arranges these stand-ins into various tableaux, which he photographs from a single, frontal vantage point. 

Gordon's marriage of digital and analog processes results in chromatic, highly layered works that delight in both the obvious and the confounding elements of their creation. Seams and fault lines are left unhidden-a wry celebration of the artist's hand that also acts to emphasize the material nature of both subject and object. This pixelation and degradation of the images, rendered in supercharged color, creates a contemporary take on post-impressionist and fauvist painting of the 20th century.

For most of his practice, Gordon's paper cutout objects have served as fundamental, yet ephemeral, elements in every work. More recently, however, Gordon's objects have found life as sculptures in their own right. For example, the artist's first ever public sculpture, Blue Poppies, eternalizes one of his paper cutouts depicting a vase with flowers in a feat of painted stainless steel and aluminum, transforming quotidian materials into a permanent monument. As one walks around the sculpture, one sees that the armatures are exposed, a testament to not only Gordon's hallmark wit, but also the significant involvement of the artist's hand within his photography practice.