Photo: Andrea Rosen Gallery / Dan Peterman

Dan Peterman’s work explores the intersection of art and ecology, eschewing didacticism in favor of poetics. He embraces a wide variety of formal and situational strategies, and employs a range of materials including recycled plastic and metals, as well as organic and post consumer waste. Peterman’s art simultaneously reveals the human capacity for ingenious problem solving, indifference toward others and the environment, and tragic hubris and greed.

His projects have included a sod covered VW bus doubling as a traveling homeless shelter, collections of discarded objects retrieved from abandoned buildings and presented in vitrines that parody archeological practices, and paving stones and shelving units fashioned from reconstituted industrial products.
In his most recent work, Peterman produces a "speculative ecological dialogue" that links a diverse set of materials, processes and references. A wood framed recreation of a Han dynasty funerary object entitled Pigsty / Latrine explores a 2,000 year old model of sanitation and nutrient conservation while simultaneously referencing the contemporary marketing of western wood frame housing to China’s growing middle class. In My Sky, a throwaway tidbit of paper—a airline boarding pass—chronicles a pattern of travel and personal impact on carbon emissions.

Things That Were are Things Again is a running wall frieze of fluid and imprecise open-poured metallic elements. Generated by way of a simplified foundry process that melts down and recasts scrap aluminum objects, this pragmatic recycling exercise has resulted in a collection of “artifacts” that reference museological structures and interpretive strategies.

While maintaining a rigorous art practice, Peterman also founded and runs the Experimental Station, a non-profit organization that provides support for innovative cultural and small enterprise initiatives.

www.experimentalstation.org

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Dan Peterman Round Trip, 2006 Photo: Andreal Rosen Gallery and the Artist	Dan Peterman Things That Were are Things Again, 2006 Photo: Andreal Rosen Gallery and the Artist	Dan Peterman Parallel Excerpts from the Universal Lab (travel pod #2), 2005 Photo: Andreal Rosen Gallery and the Artist	4 Ton Vertical Storage, 1996 Photo: Andreal Rosen Gallery and the Artist	Dan Peterman Parallel Excerpts from the Universal Lab, 2002 Photo: Andreal Rosen Gallery and the Artist	Dan Peterman The Top of the Truck That Hit the Bridge (Seasonal Fruit Stand), 1999 Photo: Andreal Rosen Gallery and the Artist