*Asylum Residency* 'DISSIMILAR' sculpture by Daniel Hayes
Fri, Jan 25
|The Asylum Art Gallery
Daniel Hayes has been working in Asylum for the month of January making sculpture from found objects. He is the first of our awarded free residencies. Come and see what he's made! 6pm - 9pm Free Entry
Time & Location
Jan 25, 2019, 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM
The Asylum Art Gallery, 21 Chapel Ash, Clifton St, Wolverhampton WV3 0TZ, UK
About the event
'TWO CUBES' (2018) is a sculpture made from mild and stainless steel. It is a study into metal as a material; particularly the rust resistance of stainless steel. It was made through recycling materials from previous artworks and finding materials from scrapyards, which is something I do frequently within my practice as a sculptor. I sanded the cubes down to make them shiny and as desirable as possible, which is ironic because they were found materials that had been discarded. This piece ignited my interest with stainless steel as a material.
My interest with old-fashioned methods and equipment combines the video and sculpture sides of my practice. My latest video work entitled ‘Raw Footage’ (2016) was made from snippets of a Kenyan safari filmed using super 8mm film in the 1960's, and then transferred to digital. It depicted clips of birds during flight, startled birds near rivers and ponds, and various indigenous animals wandering the South African savannah. In my sculpture works, I mainly use shielded metal arc welding, which is the first welding method invented, dating back to 1888.
Research into an aspect of schizophrenia called ‘the influence machine’, in which patients describe the effects as feeling like ‘an ever-changing machine’, coined in 1919 by psychoanalyst Viktor Tausk, has been perpetually feeding my practice. The idea that our identity is constructed by the digital age is something that resonates with me and informs my work. Shadows After Metropolis (2015) is a projected video work that depicts an anonymous figure being trapped between eerie black and white striations, suggesting our social identity is defined by an objective culture. Tony Oursler has made large scale outdoor projections based on ‘the influence machine’, one of which was shown outside Wolverhampton Art Gallery in October 2014. Videos of talking heads are projected onto smoke, trees and buildings, their ephemeral monologues combining to make a confessional chorus of the mass media age.