Pictures of Things That Aren’t There

“Pictures of Things That Aren’t There” is an anthology of six works loosely tied together by the circumstance of their making: all were initiated while Daniel was caring for her mother as she lived out her life with a disease that erodes the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. Her mother’s illness is never more than peripherally addressed. Daniel attends instead to the unnoticed workings of the creative imagination – the capacity of mind she believed her mother had lost. They are small works, made for one person and offered to anyone else who cares to appreciate them. Aesthetic and formal strategies vary according the needs of each piece, on the whole favoring frugality of means and emphasizing the art of making do. Drawing on an admixture of low-cost film and video materials, Daniel turns the simple interplay of pared-down cinematic elements – word and image, hearing and seeing, figure and ground, movement and stillness, document and story – into surprisingly resonant works. Each a stand-alone work in its own right, together they form a constellation of poignant meditations on the relationship between the creative imagination and our sense of self, of longing, and of loss.