Dan Peterman
ADAPTATIONS

Dan Peterman’s work insistently explores the intersection of art and ecology. He employs a wide variety
of strategies for developing projects and installations that include social and economic considerations
and an array of ecologically complicated material and situational choices. While not overly didactic or
prescriptive, his work touches upon the complex linkages of cause and effect, fluctuating values,
material transformations and our evolving attempts to make sense of our material impact on the world.

In Adaptations Peterman presents a series of object and material explorations using plastics, metals,
mud, tape, artificial turf, felt, and found objects. These pieces, mostly small installations, reveal shifting
layers of meaning and intentions. They highlight the complicated relationship we humans have with our
material world. “We are constantly adapting ourselves to changing external circumstances while adjust-
ing the values that we assign to things and situations around us.” says Peterman. ”This is an effort to
make sense of things. It is both comical and enlightening and like looking at any organism in the con-
text of their environment, it is deeply ecological.''

In this exhibition, Peterman combines both chance occurance, including references to the recent des-
truction of his studio due to fire and the natural processes of a species of insect that builds its small
compartmented apartment of mud, with deliberate decisions of fabrication and exhibition. Free form
plastic extrusions and open-cast aluminum objects highlight matter in fluid molten transformation: form
emerging from formless mass...little worlds being built. The title of one series of aluminum castings,
Things That Were are Things Again refers literally to the process of melting and recasting scrap and
cast-away aluminum objects, but also to a more complicated process of seeking definition, semiotic
meaning and utility. A pragmatic recycling exercise gives us a regenerated set of forms but leaves the
consequences open to question.

Adaptive abilities of Peterman and others are further questioned in an installation of brightly colored tape
balls, the auto-therapeutic production of an acquaintance of Peterman’s who as an outsider artist/ eco-
logist, recycles paper and tape into “useful and educational kick-balls” that exemplify the gospel of re-
cycling and reuse down to the last worthless scrap. The kick-balls are displayed on a remnant of arti-
ficial turf from a past installation of Martin Kippenberger’s The Happy End of Kafka’s Amerika. A piece
entitled 90 degree rotation of Communal Kitchen Shelf combines a recovered fragment of Peterman’s
post-fire building with an accidentally spilled, dough-like blob of plastic. In both pieces, lines of re-
sponsibility, intentionality, and authorship are blurred.

For further information or images please contact the gallery.

opening: 16th September, 3 - 6 pm
duration of the exhibition: 19th September until November 18th, 2006
opening hours: Tuesdays through Saturdays 11 - 6 pm