Daniel Bejar Bio

Statement

My work explores the traces and memories societies leave behind. Looking to social memories
that dictate historical record, my work becomes a documentation of the passage of time.
Engaging the origins of memories and histories as points of departure, I am fascinated in how
this information evolves over time, as well as the erosion of information taking place over
generations, propagating records in question.
Through an multi-disciplinary practice encompassing sculpture, video, photography and
intervention my projects initiate the construction of conventional symbols or icons from
recontextualized materials which reference history, culture or politics. Projects like Get Lost!
(NYC) restores the MTA’s subway map designed in 1979 by Michael Hertz Associates, to what
it may have geographically looked like when Henry Hudson first sailed by it’s shores in 1609,
100 year old postcards are returned to their original place of postmark in Déjà Visite, and the
deconstruction of the American Flag in the Betsy Ross Trilogy seek to connect the past to the
present. By peeling back the layers of history, alternative possibilities and understandings of our
adopted memories, histories and identities are illuminated, providing a space for re-definition.

Bio

Daniel Bejar is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. In 2009 he
participated in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space Residency, the Vermont
Studio Center Residency, and in 2008 he participated in the Artist in the Marketplace Program at
the Bronx Museum, NY. Recent exhibitions include “The New Easy”, Artnews Projects, Berlin,
Germany / “(re)terrain”, vertextList, Brooklyn, NY / “A Wrinkle In Time”, BRIC Rotunda Gallery,
Brooklyn, NY / “How Soon is Now?” AIM 28, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY and "The
World is a Handkerchief", Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs, Long Island City, NY . He is a
2007 MFA sculpture recipient from the State University of New York, New Paltz, and received
his BFA from the Ringling College of Art & Design, Sarasota, FL.