Daniel William Mirer

Daniel Mirer was born in Brooklyn New York and currently resides in Redwood City California where he works as an artist/photographer and educator. Mirer received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute and his Master of Fine Arts in Photography from the California Institute of the Arts. Mirer has participated in prestigious artist residency programs including the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program, the Bronx Museum of the Arts’ Artists in the Marketplace, Regional Central American & Caribbean Contemporary Arts Forum in Honduras, the Starry Night Artist Residence in New Mexico and the Baxter Street @ CCNY Workspace artist residency. Daniel Mirer along with other international artist had recently received through project leader Professor Katharina Bosse two start-up funding grants from the German government, Kunststiftung (Art Foundation) North Rhine-Westphalia & Landesverband Westfalen-Lippe (Foundation for the Region of Westfalia-Lippe to begin the creation of a body of work titled “Thingstätten in Deutschland.” Mirer was also the recipient of the New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for photography and the Dana Artist Fellowship for continuing education.

ArchitorSpace

The “ArchitorSpace” photographs display my specific interest in as well my fear of enclosed areas and the banality of urban spaces. These places are typologies of contemporary post-industrial architectural aesthetic which makes the individual appear so displaced within the uncanny. The photographic strategy is to make these images dense with absence purposefully; these forgotten deserted (non-sites) are environments that are entirely familiar revealing no history or functionality but yet are commonplace.

The conditions depicted within the images are sites that conjure up subconscious memories pointing out the familiarity within the redundancy of blandness within post-industrial space. These non-spaces that exist in the pictures are the enclosed public areas in which you are observed and exposed to the scrutiny of others. They reveal an emptiness that is particularly banal, and commonplace, that has become the current prominent state within the post-industrial spaces that we as a modern society navigate and inhabit.

I photograph these locations from a direct, frontal point of view, at sufficient distance to include the entire space creating a flat and melancholic state. These architectural portraits become places of a matter-of-fact that demonstrates a primary function of the still photographic image, to record. The images are of spaces in which a building facade, alley or a corridor is virtually indistinguishable from another; for me, I enjoy viewing the repetition and redundancy when collapsed into an architectural singularity of banality. Within the images, the subjects who otherwise occupy these spaces appear engulfed into the void of here-could-be-anywhere, into the monumental dissolution of space in contemporary architecture.

To view more of Daniel’s work please visit his website.