Wellfleet Adult Community Center
Monthly exhibit of Outer Cape Contemporary Artists
On Exhibit in August - Daniel Ranalli
Opening Reception: August 3, 4-6 PM
Curated by Robert Rindler
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
This series came about after travelling to Asia and experiencing its deep traditions of temporal art. The pieces in this exhibition were made on Cape Cod and in County Mayo, Ireland over a number of years. They began when I decided to sweep clean a large sandy bowl in the dunes of Provincetown where we were staying in one of the dune shacks Once it was free of footprints, I picked up a nearby rake and began to create a Zen garden. It was a very tranquil process – first imagining the shapes within the contours of the dune, and then making what was essentially a large drawing. Both the raking and the photographing of the piece was a very contemplative process as I used a large format view camera on a tripod. And of course, they would soon be erased by nature.
Although largely situated within the medium of photography, my work is often characterized as conceptual and/or environmental. The work is frequently rooted in the balance between control and chance – such as the unforeseen results in the photogram, the found scrawls on a classroom chalkboard or the path of a snail in wet sand.
ARTIST’S BIO
Daniel Ranalli has been working as a visual artist for over 45 years. His work is in the permanent collections of over thirty museums here and abroad including the Museum of Modern Art (NY), Museum of Fine Arts Boston, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Harvard Art Museums, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, List Art Gallery (MIT) and National Gallery of American Art (Smithsonian). He has been included in over 150 solo and group shows in the U.S. and abroad and has been the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and multiple fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Daniel originally came to the Outer Cape in 1981 as the newly hired Executive Director of the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill. In 1993 he founded the Graduate Program in Arts Administration at Boston University where he taught until 2015. He also wrote extensively on artist issues for several publications in the 1980s and 1990s. Dan also sits in as an occasional vocalist with the band Sensible Shoes.
Daniel and his wife, the artist Tabitha Vevers, divide their time between Wellfleet and Tucson, Arizona.