Daniel Hesidence

Daniel Hesidence “SUMMERS GUN,” 2016
8.5 x 11.75 “
Linen cover, hard-bound
140 pages, full color
Edition of 500

Jason Fox: About a month and a half ago we were sitting in a restaurant in Venice and you were talking about painting, and about how you see painting as a way to access information. The way you spoke about it was really quite beautiful. That is where I would like to begin — in a time where the word “information” is thrown around in such ubiquitous terms, with phones and social media, which I sometimes feel verges on corporate-sponsored narcissism.
Daniel Hesidence: The type of information you are referring to is out there… clearly there is an abundance of it. I don’t know how to receive or process that information. I don’t know how to understand it. It makes me feel dislocated, separate somehow. It’s this lack of connection that makes me desperate to find new sources or new pockets of information, awareness, consciousness, whatever you want to call it. I have found within how I function as a human, I’m rarely able to read something and have it click, connect, or stay in a meaningful way or duration. And it’s not limited to sponsored information, it is everything. Be it traffic signs or a simple menu board. The only way for me to gain information is by working through it. I can access it by seeing, but ultimately, for me to be engaged, I have to find it. I have to make that image, and I can’t know what it is going in. And if I do know what it is, I find it useless. So, going back to that conversation in Venice, I’ve never come across any kind of activity besides painting that we as a species can do that positions us into a space to locate new information… not just for the maker, but for an audience. And the audience doesn’t have to put too much into it either. They walk in front, and almost like a ray, it shoots into them in literally 3.6 seconds.

Daniel Hesidence lives in New York City.
He is represented by CANADA Gallery.

SUMMERS GUN, was designed by Frances Perkins and co-published by CANADA Gallery.