Dan Reisner – Artist , sculptor & Explorer
My name is Dan Reisner; I am an artist – sculptor and explorer.
Since childhood I remember myself fulfilling this equation. I remember myself discovering each morning, anew, the way from my parents' house to school, examining the trees by the road, finding rocks and collecting all sorts of objects and materials. After school hours and while playing, the nearby surrounding – the creek and the grove – had turned from a well-known location into an environment in which materials and ideas are being rediscovered, decomposing and recomposing all the time. The exposure to materials, to the possibilities of combining between them and building them as a new world, had been the basis to my future creation. The materials, their attributes, their history and their cultural association – all these are often the motive of my creation. In my work, it is important to me that the audience should experience a personal experience of discovery and excitement coming from an inner connection. I want them to experience a cultural emotional and sensual experience that would change their perspective on art and life.
In my years of study I had put myself, through my work, in the role of actor, creator, craftsman, inventor, one who can provide the ultimate work, a man of deeds, the action of the self – which expresses itself through a wide variety of materials and crafts. A good example is the statue "Fool of the Seas", which presents a figure with a wooden leg that is made according to 18th century medical books. A barrel, which I had built after a short training with a cooper, is connected to the leg. The figure has a plaster of Paris body, which resembles a Greek statue. Out of the statue comes a spinal cord, which reminds one of the neck of a musical instrument, on it there is a shell made of polyester connected to copper pipes. On the other edges of the pipes there are side view mirrors of a car. The mirrors remind one of the mythological figures – Medusa. The work has many historical and cultural references, among them stories of voyages across the ocean that are filled with terror and lack of knowledge. I was interested in the gap between order and terror, between the external and the internal, conscious and unconscious. In my work you'll always find a dialogue between past and present, between an inner experience and the surroundings in which it takes place.
In the first few years after my BA studies, I concentrated on the subjects of the human body. I was fascinated by the gap between concepts such as beauty, wholeness, aesthetics and natural performance abilities versus the fragility of the body and its weaknesses. I wanted to examine the body in its lacking – lacking in the meaning of being crippled as a result of amputation, bisection. This act of severance inhibits the body of its senses of ideal and wholeness, but at the same time the striving towards completing the object and towards perfection does not ceas...