StrainerBowl

Can you tell me your name and what you do for a living? 

My name is Daniel Arsham and I am an artist. I make visual art, film, painting and sculpture. I’m originally from Cleveland, Ohio – I’m from New York now.

What is difficult to make about your art, that people might not know is difficult?

There’s not really a rulebook for casting or creating many of the things that I make.  Many of the materials I use are not typically things you’d cast or create art from — crystal, volcanic ash — these are not typical materials to form ideas from.

You’ve written about architecture. Do you want to talk about that?

A lot of my work is about reforming the everyday and remaking things that people already have expectations about, and this is a way for many people to enter the work, because they find some familiarity in it, in the objects, in the materials, and these things are shifted in a different way.

What’s your infatuation with time?

In most of my work really since I started, since I left school, there has been a kind of obsession with time in a way where I’m allowing time to float so I never have put figures in any of the paintings, I never tried to tie it to a specific time period. I think allowing the work to kind of float in time creates a somewhat uncanny sense. The work can be from now, it could be from a thousand years from now, it could be from the past. In the same way that the work manipulates architecture or manipulates materials, it manipulates time in a similar fashion.

You’ve written about architecture. Do you want to talk about that?

A lot of my work is about reforming the everyday and remaking things that people already have expectations about, and this is a way for many people to enter the work, because they find some familiarity in it, in the objects, in the materials, and these things are shifted in a different way.

What’s your infatuation with time?

In most of my work really since I started, since I left school, there has been a kind of obsession with time in a way where I’m allowing time to float so I never have put figures in any of the paintings, I never tried to tie it to a specific time period. I think allowing the work to kind of float in time creates a somewhat uncanny sense. The work can be from now, it could be from a thousand years from now, it could be from the past. In the same way that the work manipulates architecture or manipulates materials, it manipulates time in a similar fashion.