Polyphony Beyond The Baton’s Thrust, 48.5 x 55 x 40 inches, epoxy clay, dispersed pigment, 2025
For my one person show called Out in Front of the Back of Beyond at Satchel Projects in 2026 I was interviewed by Lauren Hirshfield for Tussle Magazine.
Artists in their Studios: Daniel Wiener
MH: Your clay sculptures are an improbable mix of baroque excess and unflinching introspection, perhaps best exemplified in your masks, which cast their gaze inward as well as outward. I understand that you refer to them not as masks, but as faces. What’s your thinking behind these works?
DW: Words have often failed me, and sculpture, a mute physical art, became my chosen medium for that reason. The face is a physical medium too: thing-like and language-like at once, capable of revelation and concealment simultaneously, subject to misreading that parallels language’s own failures. My process maps onto this directly. The face reliefs are made by pressing colored epoxy clay into a mold from the back. My physical position is literally behind the face, which correlates to the activity of communication; working hard on the inside so the outside expresses some of the mess behind the scenes. The chaos percolating “behind” the face seeps through to the front in the wall reliefs like “Tangled Logic” but spills out profusely in the “standing faces” like “Polyphony Beyond The Batons Thrust”.