I'm an Artist.
"You have the most complex mind this family has ever produced. By looking at, hearing, etc. the stuff you do I can never figure out if you are serious, or if it is tongue in cheek. Are you just having fun doing something crazy, or are you satirizing, etc., current culture, etc. Do you even know what you are doing?" --Peter Nelson [father of the artist]
"It hardly does much good to have a complex mind without actually being a philosopher." --Saul Bellow
2008
140 Ways to Make a Cassette Unlistenable, The LAB, San Francisco, Calif.
Characteristics [Prototypes], Zza's Enoteca, Oakland, Calif.
2007
24 Illustrations for Schubert's "Winter Journey", Cricket Engine, Oakland, Calif.
Glacial Flowers in Colloidal Suspension or The Impossibility of Progress or
Day After Snow, Keys That Fit, Oakland, Calif.
2008
Relay, The LAB, San Francisco, Calif.
8th Annual Benefit Sale, 21 Grand, Oakland, Calif.
The LAB's Annual Fixed Price Art Sale, The LAB, San Francisco, Calif.
2007
ICON, Hive Gallery, Oakland, Calif.
Holiday Show, Rowan Morrison, Oakland, Calif.
7th Annual Benefit Sale, 21 Grand, Oakland, Calif.
Swee[t]art group show, Red Ink Studios, San Francisco, Calif.
Overhung 3: Well Hung, Boontling Gallery, Oakland, Calif.
The LAB's Annual Fixed Price Art Sale, The LAB, San Francisco, Calif.
2006
anonyme zeichner 3 [anonymous drawings 3], blütenweiss, raum für kunst, Berlin, Germany.
99cent Sale, Boontling Gallery, Oakland, Calif.
Pink Week, Cricket Engine, Oakland, Calif.
6th Annual Benefit Sale, 21 Grand, Oakland, Calif.
Some Assembly Required, The LAB, San Francisco, Calif.
Transpose, 21 Grand, Oakland, Calif.
Overhung 2: Hungover, Boontling Gallery, Oakland, Calif.
The LAB's Annual Fixed Price Art Sale, The LAB, San Francisco, Calif.
2005
The LAB Post-Postcard Show, The LAB, San Francisco, Calif.
2008
September: AKMB reading, Family Books, LA.
July: AKMB reading, Electric Works, SF.
July: AKMB reading, Rowan Morrison, Oakland.
June: AKMB reading, Porchlight storytelling series, Cafe du Nord, San Francisco.
Village Nomade Radio, Switzerland, June 3
Echoes of Innocence [set design], Company C, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco.
2007
Echoes of Innocence [set design], Company C Ballet Company, ODC Theater, San Francisco.
2006
Future Caveman percussion performance, Translocation-Recombination-Connection, Pier 2 Art Village, Kaohsiung, Taiwan.
Dodecadiscoteca, performed at the opening reception of Some Assembly Required, The LAB, San Francisco, Calif.
2005
Mooguls screening with live synthesizer accompaniment by the artist, Fake Cake Gallery, Oakland, Calif.
2008
Review of 140 Ways show at the LAB in SF Bay Guardian, Nov. 4.
AKMB review in July issue of Giant Robot.
AKMB SF release party in weekly picks, SFBG, July 30.
Oakbook magazine, July, interview about AKMB.
7x7 magazine, June.
Rolling Stone, May 29, AKMB makes #4 in the weekly Top Ten
SF Chronicle, 4/15/08, "Company C reaches new heights at Yerba Buena," review of Echoes of Innocence
All Known Metal Bands [as author], McSweeney's, San Francisco.
2007
San Francisco Chronicle, 96 Hours section, August 30, interview/show preview.
Translocation-Recombination-Connection catalog, Kaohsiung, Taiwan Bureau of Cultural Affairs Press.
The Believer magazine, June/July, "All Known Metal Bands - R" [excerpt of AKMB].
2006
East Bay Express, April 19, review of Transpose show.
2004-5
Bay Area Buzz magazine, CD reviews [author].
2005-present
Independent web designer, Oakland, Calif.
2001-02
Photography instructor at Nonnewaug H.S., Woodbury, CT.
1999-2002
Staff photographer at Voices newspaper, Woodbury, CT.
2000
Future Farmers of America award for Best Agricultural Photojournalism.
1990
Scholastic Achievement Award for Photography.
1995
BA liberal arts, St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland.
"Those of you who can remember them know that cassette tapes aren't exactly sturdy. Forever getting tangled in car stereos or being left to bake on dashboards, during their commercial heyday they practically advertised their obsolescence — Maxell ads be damned. But anyone who has managed to wrest the audio from within a warped plastic shell knows that the metamorphosed sound can be strangely beautiful. Composer Daniel Basinkski has made a second career out of looping the death rattles from his magnetic tape archive, and Kevin Shields nearly bankrupted Creation Records while trying to make his guitars sound like so many corroded C-90 tapes.
"Dan Nelson invokes the cassette's history of planned obsolescence in "140 Ways to Make a Cassette Tape Unlistenable," his contribution to "Relay," a modest group show of sound-related art at the LAB. Nelson is no stranger to lists, as attested to by his handsome grimoire All Known Metal Bands (McSweeney's, 300 pages, $22). Here, though, he catalogs his repeated and sometimes frustrated attempts at destruction rather than posterity.
Lining the walls are vitrines and photographs displaying the remains of cassettes: encased in cement, mobster-style; wrapped in electrical tape; atomized from hammer blows; power-sawed in two. There are letters documenting Nelson's attempts to send tapes over Niagara Falls and into outer space on a NASA rocket. Most hilariously, a missive to the Gagosian Gallery pleads for one of Nelson's cassettes to be interred with Ed Ruscha when Ruscha passes on.
Nelson's installation mines its laughs and its conceptual heft from a self-deprecatory stance: cassettes have long been declared a dead medium, despite whatever nostalgic eternal return may be planned by the Urban Outfitters cultural industrial complex. The ridiculous length to which Nelson is willing to pursue his mission only further underscores this fact. The flogging of a dead horse is rarely so much fun to watch."
-- Matt Sussman, SF Bay Guardian, November 4, 2008.
"I didn't see the purported theme of lost childhood in "Echoes of Innocence," to grimly manipulated piano music by Ingram Marshall, but Patrick Hajduk's lighting and Dan Nelson's video projections on tall panels looked fabulous."
--Rachel Howard, San Francisco Chronicle, April 15, 2008
Translating music to images is not an easy task - ask anyone who's tried to make a music video - but artist Dan Nelson gave himself some additional challenges. Instead of using a piece of, say, contemporary music, Nelson drew inspiration from the work of Franz Schubert. He's made a series of illustrations for Schubert's 24-song cycle "Winterreise," or "The Winter Journey."
"I studied Schubert in a music theory class," says Bay Area resident Nelson, "and I started listening to him more and more. He wrote almost 1,000 songs. It's clear that when you compare listening to Schubert to pop music of the 20th century, he was a very nuanced composer." Nelson, whose book "All Known Metal Bands" will be published this spring, has done work around music before. One project, "140 Ways to Make a Cassette Unlistenable," documented exactly what the title says - through sculpture, photographs, video and testimonial, he showed ways for a plastic cassette to get trashed. For this show, Nelson worked through all the songs in order. He wanted to match Schubert's musical discipline - there is only a voice and a piano in "The Winter Journey" - by using only black-and-white. "I was interested in getting maximum effect of minimum tools - sort of similar to a Matisse line drawing, where a single line fills in a picture," says Nelson. "I started doing the illustrations as part of a daily drawing group, where we drew every day for a year. During the last month of the group, I did a few and then realized I wanted to illustrate the whole series of songs." Nelson's focus soon changed. "What happened is that I started by paying a lot of attention to the lyrics," Nelson says. "They are poems from a book of poetry from a second-rate poet. They're really sentimental and romantic in a really extreme way. ... I started paying less attention to the lyrics and more to what the music was doing to illustrate the lyrics. "Sometime I'd illustrate just a certain moment or a certain word," he says. "I was trying for more and more freedom as I went along." He says that the show's value doesn't depend on how faithfully he illustrates the music as much as how it resonates with him and his audience. "As long as it implants a thought or conveys a thought, it's a success.""Transpose: The Image & Everyday Life" Obi-Wan Kenobi said not to trust your eyes; they can deceive you. Painter Steven Robert Barich turns that maxim into an art lesson with "Transpose," featuring several large-scale photoreal B&W paintings broken by conflicting perspectives. Barich digitally combines pics in Photoshop, prints a transparency of the collage, projects it onto a large piece of paper, then paints over it to generate the trippy yet realistic effects. Also on the collage tip, former news photographer Dan Nelson presents ten "photems," disparate images of everyday life stacked on top of each other like a totem pole. Boring and overlooked objects like rusting cars and taxidermied marmosets somehow add up to mysterious narratives about the futility of life, largely because Nelson's tight cropping kills any context."
--David Downs, East Bay Express, April 19, 2006.
