First Look: Daniel R. Small

• PUBLICATION Art in America
• DATE June 2016
• PDF cecimoss.com

Excerpt / Theorist Vilém Flusser once wrote that history is “a progressive process of comprehension.” Los Angeles artist Daniel R. Small’s research-based practice, which involves photography, film, sculpture, and even archaeology, delves into the murky waters of history, revealing the persistence of myth and imagination. Small, who studied photography at the Rhode Island School of Design and the San Francisco Art Institute (where he graduated with an MFA in 2010), understands how assumptions regarding authenticity have long riddled the medium. The supposed task of an image, or an object for that matter, to accurately represent a clear-cut truth drives his exhaustive research, which ranges from the military’s production of uranium to the eccentric funerary rites of violinist Jorge Hiller, who had his remains cremated and made into a diamond phonograph needle.

— “First Look: Daniel R. Small” in Art in America, June 2016