bitforms gallery

Pixelweaver
Daniel Canogar
April 28–June 17, 2023

Opening reception: Friday, April 28, 6–8 PM
Gallery hours: Tuesday–Saturday: 11 AM–6 PM

Pixelweaver draws on textiles as a metaphor to portray the social fabric that emerges from a data-driven society. For this exhibition, Daniel Canogar manifests a virtual loom based on craft techniques. This algorithmic tool enables the creation of a wide range of patterns from different data sources. Exhibited works pay tribute to the close relationship between information technology and textiles in reference to the jacquard loom, considered by many historians to be the first computer.

Abacus displays and reinterprets real-time financial information from main stock market indexes, such as Dow Jones, Nasdaq, FTSE, and DAX, as well as data from cryptocurrency and foreign exchange markets. The artwork reformulates ticker tape, paper ribbon imprinted with stock pricing dating back to the late nineteenth century, as the earliest means of financial communication. Prices from each index fund appear as intersecting stripes that turn into the warp and weft of a fiscal mosaic.

Túnica is a series of generative tapestries powered by diverse data sources. Each patchwork is imprinted in a different digital fabric—embossed silver and golds, intertwining stripes of fibrous greens, and rich braided leather. This body of work focuses on honoring and memorializing integral aspects of our shared ecosystem, ritualizing death, extinction, and regeneration. 

In a continuation of the artist’s examination of woven material, Chyron is rendered using electronically generated captions that appear at the bottom of the screen during news broadcasts. Projected in large-scale across the main room of the gallery, Canogar’s chyrons intertwine as a large frayed fabric, a tangle that evokes the fragile and at times unstable balance of an information ecosystem created from disparate and even conflicting sources. Updated in real time, this algorithmic artwork features headings from major international news channels, including CNN, Fox News, Bloomberg, BBC News, Reuters, CNBC, Al Jazeera, and Le Monde.

Daniel Canogar
b. 1964, Madrid, Spain
Lives and works in Madrid and Los Angeles, CA

Born in Madrid (1964) to an American mother and Spanish father, Daniel Canogar’s life and career have bridged between Spain and the U.S. Photography was his earliest medium of choice, receiving a M.A. from NYU at the International Center of photography in 1990. He soon became interested in the possibilities of the projected image and installation art.

He has created permanent public art installations, including Pareidolia, a permanent generative artwork commissioned by Chapman University for its Escalette Permanent Art Collection, (California, 2023);  Brushstrokes, a permanent LED screen artwork for the new DeKa Bank headquarters’ lobby (Frankfurt, 2022); Dynamo, a site- specific audiovisual project designed for the Spain Pavilion in Expo Dubai 2020 (Dubai, 2021); Currents, a suspended artwork in the atrium of the renovated Evangelische Bank (Kassel, 2020); Aqueous, at The Sobrato Organization (Mountain View, CA, 2019); Pulse, at the Zachry Engineering Education Complex in Texas A&M University (College Station, TX, 2018); Cannula, Xylem and Gust II at the BBVA Bank Headquarters (Madrid, 2018) and Tendril, at Tampa International Airport (Tampa, FL, 2017). He has also created public monumental artworks in different media such as Oculus, a generative animation featured on Novartis Pavillon zero-media façade (Basel, Switzerland, 2022); Bifurcation, a multi-laser projection at Noor Riyadh Light & Art Festival (Riyadh, 2021); Amalgama Phillips (Washington DC, 2021) and Amalgama El Prado (Madrid, 2019), generative videos projected on the façades go the Phillips Collection and the Museo Nacional del Prado, created with the painting collections of both institutions; Fulgurations, a project in collaboration with the Spanish National Cancer Research Center (CNIO) (Madrid, 2021); Constellations, the largest photo-mosaic in Europe created for two pedestrian bridges over the Manzanares River, in Madrid Rio Park (Madrid, 2010) and Asalto, a series of video projections presented on various emblematic monuments, including the Arcos de Lapa (Rio de Janeiro, 2009), the Puerta de Alcalá (Madrid, 2009) and the church of San Pietro in Montorio (Rome, 2009). Also part of the series is Storming Times Square, screened on forty-seven of the LED billboards in Times Square (New York, NY, 2014).

Canogar has exhibited extensively in major museums and galleries across the world, including Reina Sofia Art Museum, Madrid; Palacio de Velázquez, Madrid; The Phillips Collection, Washington DC; ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe; Kunsthalle Mannheim, Mannheim; Ulsan Art Museum, Ulsan; Max Estrella Gallery, Madrid; bitforms gallery, New York, NY; Wilde Gallery, Geneva and Basel; Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt; Eduardo Secci Contemporary, Florence; Kornfeld Gallery, Berlin; Santa Mónica Art Center, Barcelona; Alejandro Otero Museum, Caracas; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus OH; Offenes Kulturhaus Center for Contemporary Art, Linz; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Düsseldorf; Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Berlin; Borusan Contemporary Museum, Istanbul; American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY; Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA and Art Vault  at the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation, Santa Fe, NM.