Artist’s Statement
My work attempts to connect a relatively mundane everyday life in a simultaneously gentrifying and decaying NYC, with the entire human history of empire, violence, colonialism, and suffering. These wounds of history leave an impact that is hidden and obvious. Photographs taken on long walks around Queens and Brooklyn combine with drawings based on or influenced by historical photographs and events. With the advent of the internet, a prison cell in Iraq, or a humiliating punishment visited on a repressed people in the past is now instantly accessible and learned about in graphic detail. An abandoned building you walk past in Bushwick that will soon be torn down and made into condos seems to house these projections and ghosts of history. They scream at you as you pass and ask how existence and the notion of progress can continue in a world seemingly defined by it’s wars and tragedies.
DANIEL KOLM (Instagram: @dannyarklight, www.arklight.bandcamp.com) is an artist, musician, and photographer from Astoria, Queens. His art and photography have appeared in Sensitive Skin Magazine, Public Illumination Magazine, The Unbearables anthologies, and as the covers of several of Ron Kolm’s books. He is the lead singer and guitarist of the band Arklight, which has been making music since 2003 and have released countless CDrs and cassettes on small labels in the United States and Europe.