Check out Daniel Kersh’s Artwork

Today we’d like to introduce you to Daniel Kersh.

Daniel, we’d love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today both personally and as an artist.
I was sort of thrown into the performing arts world right before high school and I immediately fell in love with the community of people and the work we were able to create. I started getting involved in theatre production and very quickly found a passion for working with light. I also fell in love with storytelling and being able to create really large compositions. I decided Lighting Design was what I needed to pursue as a career and I graduated high school a year early to start attending the University of Arizona to study Lighting Design. After my Freshman year of college, I began working for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company in New York City where I first really fell in love with dance.

I decided I wanted to start studying dance while in New York City for a deeper understanding of the work I was so passionate about designing. The energizing tension I found in dance resonated the same in my body as it did when I was in the studio creating compositions and movement with light. It really shaped my view of how to create lines and shape in space with an intangible material and it gave me an entry point into being able to design light for dance. I’m interested in translating different qualities of movement into light and how they can be replicated and echoed in a physical space or atmosphere.

In college, my work started feeling hollow. I felt I needed to make work that meant something and created an emotional or intellectual response from an audience. I began studying studio art at the university and spent the following semester studying contemporary art at the Santa Reparata International School of Art in Florence, Italy. While there I also studied different modern and contemporary dance techniques from Gabriella Secchi and Angelo Egarese where I began to develop a stronger connection to movement and ideas of release and control.

We’d love to hear more about your art. What do you do and why and what do you hope others will take away from your work?
I am a lighting designer and visual artist and I create work for the stage, as well as unconventional spaces, and gallery settings. I love working in the shared space of the theatre where we’re able to create a world and open avenues in the mind for conversation. There’s a collaborative aspect about working in the theatre and the feeling of building something together that’s bigger than all of us. I specialize in creating work for dance. I feel my work is felt the most purely through the language of choreography. Both are so transient and fleeting and only exist within the moment of the performance. It’s about language as much as it is movement. A language beyond words, where we discover each other through experiences echoed in our own body.

There’s a sculptural quality to lighting a dancer, creating a liquid architecture. Being based on time, it creates and destroys itself in every moment. With light, I’m interested in creating and destroying different structures to create an architecture of the space that is constantly building and falling apart, an environment that’s living and breathing with the dancers. I’m interested in building tension within a space by creating energizing conflict and working with the point in which it releases. This physicality of light occupying space and the way in which it moves comes from a deeply rooted place in my own body and is where I pull the most inspiration from.

My installation work focuses on constructing material perceptions of the immaterial. I created a site-specific light installation titled “Rilascia” in the basement of a gallery in Florence, Italy. Light from a projector was used to create line and shape in three dimensions of space with the use of atmospheric fog and haze. The work flowed between hollowed out shapes surrounding and encapsulating the viewer, to moments of immediate release where the shape shatters and moves through different combinations of clean line mapped to corners of the room and individual grooves of the bricks in the walls. In variable speeds, line cut and divided the space into pieces, some thin and transparent, some with volume and depth making opaque walls. I experimented with planes of light in varying transparencies to alter spatial perception. The viewer gets caught in the middle of messy arrays of light and shadow, then suddenly brought back into the hollowed out shape and re-introduced to the stillness, calm, and clarity of watching light diverge from a single point and the motion of atmospheric fog slowly waving through the thin curved plane of light. There was also an interactive element where the viewer was encouraged to intercept the lines with part of their body in order to try and grasp the immateriality of the form. The intimate experience evoked curiosity and grounded the viewer in the present moment of time and continuously changing space. The work aimed to reveal sensory experience to be an unstable foundation for our understanding of our place in the world.

My lighting serves as an additional entry point into a work for an audience to connect to. I spend a lot of time discussing and exchanging thoughts and ideas with my collaborators so my choices will be imbedded in the themes and ideas of the piece. When I’m designing I instinctually “sketch” out as many ideas as I can. I try to create a mass of graphic images, drawings of bodies, colors, and relevant research photos. Then I go back and try to apply all of those visual images to the content of the work to see what will fit, what will look visually pleasing, what will make a statement, what will further progress or create an entry point into an idea or concept. Structure is very important to me. I’m interested in connecting to the macro rather than individual bodies; manipulating structures, directions, pathways, and maps of how light may move through space as well as structures that follow themes inside a work.

I typically seek out reductions in form in search of a deeper, more honest effect. I’m interested in minimalism and simple expressions of complex thought. Creating realities of pure color and light and composing delicately hued colors in luminous fields of light. My work is often described as meditative. I feel states of meditation and focus invite visual and emotional contemplation and create conditions for silence and contemplation. My style is very contemporary in the way of keeping light objective. Creating strong images and compositions that are beautiful, but maybe unclear about what they mean. In the same way that topics in contemporary dance and art are typically speaking, the audience is asked to come up with their own answer for a meaning that isn’t entirely explainable.

What do you think it takes to be successful as an artist?
I feel success as an artist when I’ve accomplished a piece of work, whatever the goal might have been. I feel successful if I create a connection for someone in the audience or make them feel something from a performance. I feel your career is one of the highest forms of self-expression and naturally defines you. So, I want to do to work that continually gives me fulfillment, that is intellectually and emotionally satisfying, and work that I enjoy with people I enjoy working with. As long as I continue to do that, I will continue to feel successful.

Do you have any events or exhibitions coming up? Where would one go to see more of your work? How can people support you and your artwork?
You can check out my work and contact me on my website listed below.

I’m currently doing a lot of collaboration with Hawkinsdance and my work can be seen with them in the upcoming months. We have a commissioned work at Breaking Ground Dance Festival this year in Tempe, AZ on January 26th, 2019. I’ll be designing the lighting for the premiere of Shelly Hawkins’ trio entitled, “The Crystal Cave” which imagines a perfect and hidden place, undisturbed and uncorrupted, subject to the laws of nature but not the effects of humanity.

Hawkinsdance will also be presenting “The People Electric”, an evening length contemporary dance production at the Scoundrel and Scamp Theater at Tucson’s Historic Y, March 15-17, 2019. I’ll be designing the lighting and coinciding light installations for the production. The featured piece of the evening will be an expression of feminism and identity, with a stylistic nod to the second wave feminist movement of the 1960s-70s, and music by local artists. The show will also feature “The Crystal Cave” in case you miss it at Breaking Ground.

We’d love to see you there!

I’m also always looking for other visual artists, directors, and choreographers to work and collaborate with. Feel free to reach out if you’re interested in creating work!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.danielkershdesigns.com
• Email: Danielkersh@gmail.com
• Instagram: @Danielkersh
• Facebook: @Danielkersh

Image Credit:
Ed Flores; Sydney Abeyta

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