Daniel Bejar Bio

Statement

My work questions the collective memory, traces, and history found in contemporary life.
Utilizing sculpture, video, photography, performance and intervention my projects appropriate
and recontextualize familiar objects, sites, and situations as a strategy to illuminate and subvert
historical assumptions and ingrained systems of belief that are found in the present conscious.
By employing modes of evocation to bring the past into the present, a rupture is created,
opening a new space which I view as a place to challenge the present.
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, or one hundred year old postcards which are returned to their original
place of postmark in “Déjà Visite”, and the deconstruction of the American Flag in the “Betsy
Ross Trilogy” all similarly seek to connect the past to the present.
My practice aims to peel back the layers of history, where viewers are encouraged to question
the present and envision alternate possibilities for tomorrow.

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.