This week the Brooklyn-based commercial painting firm Overall Murals put the finishing touches on “Summer Still Life with Lobster and Fern,” a mural depicting an arrangement of fruit and flowers plus the title’s fern and lobster, designed by New York artist Daniel Gordon, at Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway on the tunnel ventilation building facing Dewey Square, along Purchase Street between Congress Street and Summer Street.
In addition to the mural, “Daniel Gordon on The Greenway,” which is scheduled to be on view through May 2022, offers a selection of Gordon’s photography installed on the Greenway in the North End and Wharf District. “This installation will bring Gordon’s work into the public realm for the first time,” The Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy writes.
Born in Boston, raised in San Francisco, based in Brooklyn, Gordon is known for creating photos that typically entertain with their funny play and confusion between digital and handcraft.
As Karen Rosenberg explained in The New York Times in 2014, “Gordon starts in the most innocuous, inauspicious of ways: with Google searches for still lifes. He then prints the results—images of fruits, vegetables and vases—and turns them into three-dimensional photo-sculptures with scissors and glue. Those objects are then arranged on punchy, patterned backdrops, a la Matisse, and photographed. In yet another stage of picture making, the photographs are tweaked through digital editing; colors are changed with Fauvist abandon and background features—shadows, a studio window—added or erased.”
In mid-June, the Greenway Conservancy plans to install a sculpture by Gordon “that will be an enlarged version of the paper objects that Gordon employs in his photographs.”
The Greenway Conservancy says, “The multidisciplinary exhibition begs the question, where does the line lie between a photograph, a painting, and a sculpture?”
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