DANIEL TURNER
PARTICLE PROCESSED CAFETERIA

KÖNIG BERLIN
9 SEPTEMBER – 30 OCTOBER 2016 

The work of Daniel Turner can be seen as a distillation of materials, processes and their interconnected reactionary effects. For the current exhibition on view at the ST. AGNES | NAVE, the artist has reduced a predetermined specific physical and social environment into a liquid state, stripped from conventional attributes to nearly alien form.

Through a laborious deconstructive process, the customary components of a cafeteria – steel folding chairs, collapsible tables of steel and wood — have been reduced to particle form, chemically modified and then dissolved across the expanse of the gallery floor. A reduction of the original institution into an emulsive stain.

Mounted alongside the cafeteria is a displaced sodium light, titled Lithonia (2016). Commonly used to illuminate areas of congregation, the lamp's exposure to its own UV light and heat initiates photo and thermal oxidation, an incremental process of natural degradation. The result of these concurrent reactions has darkened the light's exterior casing into a bronze byproduct.
 
For Turner, form is a process of transformation whereby one level of experience finds its mirroring correlation in another. His choice of a material speaks to familiar yet constrained environments preserving the affects which a place gathers to itself where its conditions remain boundless.