Dane Palmieri

Statement

My practice is centered on the emotional mining of sentiment and memory, sifting through the strata of lived life and carefully interpreting and preserving the newly constructed realities that surface. The sculptures, installations, and assemblages brought forth from this exploration depict visually the tensions that can form while transposing memories and emotions into imagery.

I utilize the vestiges of the past as an emotional trigger in order to regenerate these once symbols of being into a state of re-existence. The reduction of these experiences down to their most tangible form opens up an emotionally salient pathway into further understanding what consequence they may hold. Materiality plays a significant role in my ability to evoke such visceral reactions, and a diverse selection of mediums ranging from the found, artistic, heirloom, and decorative, to the commercially available, assists me in their elucidation.

Melding these elements with techniques first acquired during my youth, such as woodworking, photography, textile practices, and casting processes yields compositions that act as autobiographical palimpsests. The mnemonic qualities that imbue the work assume the role of binder between both the physical and the emotional planes, serving to define each piece and secure their existence.

GlogauAIR Project

The project in which I would like to pursue would be loosely based on the work of the early 20th century art historian and cultural theorist Aby Warburg and his Mnemosyne Atlas.The work would employ various organizational techniques developed and/or utilized by Warburg in order to dissect, categorize, emotionally interpret, and link together parts of my own archive of personal material.These emotionally salient materials range from the sculptural to the photographic, the industrial to the natural, and through to writings, stories, and olfactory sense based experiences. I wish to formulate a process to connect these seemingly arbitrary bits of information into a greater survey of self exploration and understanding.

In much of my previous work I have focused primarily on singular highly personal objects to invoke memories, emotions, or connections to the past. I built pathways or entry points through these objects to better understand them in a space and time in which we can both occupy simultaneously.This work looks to take a much broader approach, utilizing a multitude of these emotional artifacts to create a larger, more zoomed out, vision of “the why”. The resonance of these artifacts, and how deeply entrenched they are in my psyche, is a constant fascination and enigma.They are fragments of a language I have yet to learn to speak. This work is an attempt to piece together and translate those fragments into a larger narrative.

The work itself would be developed in multiple stages. Firstly, there would be further research into the methodology of Warburgs organizational and mapping(out) processes, along with other forms of archival and classification techniques. By studying these techniques I hope to plot out a course of action that allows me to identify and classify the various areas I wish to pursue. Through this classification I will begin to select the personal artifacts/elements for which I deem relevant to the larger investigation, labeling and categorizing them accordingly. This will then allow me to determine what form this work will take on visually.Whether the artifacts will be enhanced by sculptural interventions, assemblage, installation, video or sound, or purely display is the part of the process that can not be known beforehand. It is my desire to breathe a new life into each element and allow them to lead the way into the next chapter of our coexistence.

CV Summary

• Dane Palmieri (b. 1984, New Jersey, United States) is a visual artist living and working between Buenos Aires, New York, and New Jersey. He studied garment design and pattern cutting at the Philadelphia Art Institute and worked for many years within the design industry.
• Dane ended his design tenure in 2015 in order to begin establishing his practice as a visual artist. The work he has developed since mediates the tensions between sentimentality and the physical world. Palmieri portrays a persistent attempt to calcify the ephemeral nature of memory, constructing pieces that become tangible emotional statements passed from artist to viewer
• Palmieri has exhibited both nationally and internationally, having been invited to show his installation Detritus in White at Quimera Gallery (Buenos Aires, Argentina 2021) as well as participated in the group exhibition Ecosistema de Afectos at Camargo 1020 (Buenos Aires, Argentina 2021). He was also a recipient of the Reclaim Award in 2021 and presented the large scale work Your Wounds are Showing as part of a public exhibition in Cologne, Germany. Most recently, Dane presented his solo exhibit entitled After Duquesnoy at Media Gallery (Buenos Aires, Argentina 2023)

Gallery