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Bio
Born in 1972, Dan Nelson grew up in rural Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Began his creative life as a photographer and drummer. Attended St. John's College and studied a fixed, seminar-based curriculum of liberal arts. Sailed in the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Pacific from 1996-98 on traditionally-rigged sailing ships. Worked as the staff photographer at a small newspaper in Connecticut for three years. Moved to Oakland, California in 2002 to found a heavy art rock band that produced one album. After 20 years of multifarious creative pursuits began to call himself an artist. He uses music, language, lists, and symbols to pursue experiments in communication and perception. His book All Known Metal Bands was published by McSweeney's in 2008. He is currently an artist, musician, and writer in Oakland, Calif. and Portland, Oregon.
Skills
Adobe Creative Suite, esp. Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator.
HTML coding and web design.
E-commerce platforms.
Audio recording and editing.
Film and digital photography and Photoshop.
Video shooting and editing.
Writing, proofreading.
Fluent in French and English.
Employment
Elemental LED, Emeryville, Calif.
April 2009 - present
Creative engineer at an e-commerce company selling LED lighting to individuals and businesses. Create and manage written content and product photographs; create educational materials, including videos, tutorials, and diagrams; create videos and written marketing materials, including blogs, advertisements, and SEO/SEM.
Independent web designer
Jan. 2005 - Jan. 2009
Conceive, design, and construct web sites for artists and music groups using html and my photography. Examples at www.toychestra.com, www.lexawalsh.com, and www.thomasscandura.com.
Bay Area Buzz Magazine, Oakland, Calif.
June 2003 - August 2004
Freelance contributing writer to bimonthly music magazine. Wrote record reviews, interviews, and photographed live bands.
SFMNPA, San Francisco, Calif.
Sept. 2002 - Jan. 2005
Instructor in the Age of Sail overnight school programs, run by the San Francisco Maritime National Park Association. Responsible for instructing twenty to forty students per day during hands-on educational activities on board the historical sailing ship Balclutha, on the pier, and in small boats.
Nonnewaug High School, Woodbury, Conn.
Sept. 2001 - May 2002
Instructor of photography at a public high school. Taught students the basics of shooting black and white film, processing negatives, and darkroom printing. Organized photo labs and field trips.
Voices newspaper, Woodbury, Conn.
Jan. 1999 - August 2002
Chief staff photographer at independently owned newspaper, covering eight towns, and circulating to 30,000 homes twice weekly. Covered news, sports, politics, and features, and contributed written features and theater reviews.
Bombard Balloon Adventures
Dec. 2001 - Jan. 2002
Crew member at luxury hot-air ballooning company in France and Switzerland. Duties included rigging and downrigging hot-air balloons, chasing and landing daily balloon flights, and safe transport of clients.
Publications/Press
2011
Aria Statica reviews, Dumpster Diving Blog, Olive Music, Foxy Digitalis.
Aria Statica (as Boron), cassette, Field Hymns Records (FH013).
2010
Art Publishing Now, Southern Exposure, San Francisco, Calif.
Decrresscenndo (as Boron), cassette, Field Hymns Records (FH008).
2009
Word Magazine, UK, AKMB interview/review, Oct. 2009.
GQ UK, AKMB review, Sept. 2009.
AKMB review, The Independent, UK, Sept. 2009.
AKMB one of the winners of the AIGA's (American Institute of Graphic Art) 50 Books/50 Covers award.
East Bay Express, June 3, cover story about Make an Artist a Millionaire.
AKMB review, Chico News & Review, Jan. 15, 2009.
2008
Relay show review, SF Bay Guardian blog, November 4, 2008.
Review of 140 Ways show at the LAB in SF Bay Guardian, Nov. 4.
AKMB picked as one of Amazon.com's Best of the Year So Far: Hidden Gems.
AKMB picked by Amazon.com as one of Top 10 Editors' Picks for Best Cover Design.
AKMB review in July issue of Giant Robot.
AKMB SF release party in weekly picks, SFBG, July 30.
Oakbook magazine, July, interview about All Known Metal Bands.
7x7 magazine, June.
Rolling Stone, May 29, All Known Metal Bands 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].
Awards
2009
All Known Metal Bands one of the winners of the AIGA's (American Institute of Graphic Art) 50 Books/50 Covers award.
2008
All Known Metal Bands picked as one of Amazon.com's Best of the Year So Far: Hidden Gems.
All Known Metal Bands picked by Amazon.com as one of Top 10 Editors' Picks for Best Cover Design.
2000
Future Farmers of America award for Best Agricultural Photojournalism.
1990
Scholastic Achievement Award for Photography.
Collections
AIGA Design Archives at the Denver Art Museum (All Known Metal Bands).
The Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University (All Known Metal Bands).
Education
1995
BA liberal arts, St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland.
Solo gallery shows
2010
The Origin and Future of the Blood, Swee[t]art Drawing Gallery, Oakland, Calif.
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.
Group gallery shows
2011
Hands & Pants, Swarm Gallery, Oakland, Calif.
Chain-Letter, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles, Calif.
2009
object oriented, Compound Gallery, Oakland, Calif.
Red and White, Zza's Enoteca, Oakland, Calif.
Heavy Hitters, Cricket Engine Gallery, Oakland, Calif.
Regime Change, Swarm Gallery, 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.
Performance/Participation
2010
October: Shine a Light (as member of the Portland Jingle Orchestra), Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon.
August: AKMB reading, Local Fest, Battleground, Washington.
May: AKMB reading, Ash St. Saloon, Portland, Oregon, with Ninja.
May: AKMB reading, The Waypost, Portland, Oregon.
February: Your Name Here reading, Northern, Olympia, WA, with Calvin Johnson reading from AKMB.
2009
June: member of the Oakland Jingle Orchestra, Cricket Engine, Oakland, 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 Ballet Company, 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.
Press Clips
for Make an Artist a Millionaire -- Rachel Swan, East Bay Express, June 3, 2009.
"As an artist, 37-year-old Dan Nelson has attained moderate success. He participates in four or five group shows each year and usually has one or two solo exhibits as well. On average he sells about four or five pieces a show, which is enviable, especially during an economic recession. (In fact, Nelson admitted, it's good to sell anything at a show.) His biggest coup thus far was the book All Known Metal Bands, a giant alphabetical list of all the metal bands known to exist. Published by McSweeney's, it runs to 300 pages in hardcover. Copies sell for $20 a pop. "I definitely made more money selling that book than all of my visual pieces combined," Nelson said. Since the publication of All Known Metal Bands last year, he's been thinking more like a capitalist. He'd like to keep his artistic vocation but figure out how to get rich. Specifically, he'd like to make a million dollars.
"Such was the impetus for Nelson's latest project, "Why Not Make an Artist a Millionaire?" Nelson put the question on a framed placard and underneath it wrote: "Make your $1 donation by PayPal to zz9zz7zz5@hotmail.com." He debuted it at 21 Grand's 9th-annual benefit sale along with a small donation box. A few people bit. Between the show and the PayPal account, Nelson's accrued roughly $60 in thus far. As he continues gathering dollar bills he'll put them in the installation. "It's gonna be a pallet of bundles of $1 bills, a million dollars, physically, of cash," Nelson explained. He vows to document everything he did to achieve the objective (from making posters to sending PR announcements) and include that as part of the piece. "It can become a rich, complex piece if I want it to," he said.
""Make an Artist a Millionaire" isn't Nelson's only way of integrating mercantile impulses into his artwork. Last year, he came up with an idea for a unique, self-boosting performance piece. It would require him to get hired as an artist-in-residence of sorts, for a big company with a big office building and, presumably, a big lobby. (Google might be a candidate, he thought, or Apple, or Toyota.) The way Nelson explains it, it sounds a bit like old-school patronage: For an annual salary of, say, $50,000, Nelson would set up his studio in the lobby and spend the day pursuing his own creative work. At the end of the year he would present the company with a nice piece of lobby art.
"The idea is to avoid any traditional exchange, said Nelson. Still, he thinks it's ultimately a fair trade. "Normally they'd go out and pay fifty or a hundred grand for a huge painting that's in the lobby," he said. With this alternative, company execs get all the pleasure of having an artist in their midst. "They are patrons of the artist for a year. They get a performance where my studio is in their lobby. ... I like to think I can semantically arrange it so that they're really paying me for my time."
"If anyone could persuade some corner-office executive to turn art-making into a job, it would be Nelson. The Massachusetts-born liberal-arts major-turned-graphic-designer has a great elevator pitch for everything he does. Right now he's working on a series of red and gray sculptures that represent French philosopher Blaise Pascal's 32 "Pensees," notes toward his unfinished defense of Christianity. He's given it a Hollywood blockbuster title, "The Origin and Future of the Blood." It's part of a heady sequence of monochromatic works that also included black paper cutouts inspired by Franz Schubert's song cycle Winterreise, and silver illustrations of letters from various alphabets, many of them shaped into animals, tools, or pieces of architecture. Nelson got hip to both Schubert and Pascal while attending St. John's College in Maryland and found a way to incorporate both into his career. As an artist, he's rigorously imaginative. More importantly, he's enterprising to a point that verges on being mercenary. In fact, Nelson's ambition got him in trouble long before he started asking people to add a million dollars to his personal coffers.
"It began with All Known Metal Bands, which, it turns out, was partly based on the web site Encyclopaedia Metallum: The Metal Archives. The first person to dispute its worth was blogger Cosmo Lee of InvisibleOranges.com, who called the book a "copy-and-paste job." Nelson maintains that he found Encyclopaedia Metallum about six months after launching the project, and that he did use it as source material along with several other web sites (including MySpace.com) and the bargain bins of various record stores. Unfortunately, Nelson didn't include an acknowledgements page in All Known Metal Bands. "Of course, I thank Encyclopaedia Metallum on my web site," he said. "At the same time, I have no response to the copyright infringement question. No one can copyright a list of anything as far as I know. My list is different from their list."
"Still, it raises the question of whether Nelson's most successful work of art is, in fact, legitimate. And if not, then does he really deserve to be compensated full-time for his craft? Nelson seems to think so. He's currently developing a curriculum vitae based partly on the dossier he's created over the years and partly on the amount of hours he's put in. (In order to "quantify" his skill level, Nelson had to go back over twenty years and try to calculate all the time spent researching, conceptualizing, and making pieces.) He's also researching the art-buying habits of various large companies. He's using benchmarks like the metal band book to confer some sort of stature. "There's a bit of an element of the ridiculous in this project because you can't qualify the skill level of an artist in numbers terms," Nelson explained. He is, after all, applying for a position that's nonexistent.
"There's a lot of moral ambiguity to Nelson's current projects. He is asking people to take it as an article of faith that his art is worth bankrolling, and that artists shouldn't have to work a separate day job to support themselves. Nelson isn't without his detractors, but he's got a lot of buy-in, as well. One admiring fan mailed him a dollar bill with a Post-it note attached: "Dear Mr. Nelson: I was looking for a different artist 'Dan Nelson' when I stumbled on your site. If you weren't an artist, I wouldn't be doing this. Hope it happens 4 you!" Nelson said that a lot of people have been equally supportive, and not really questioned his intentions. (He points out that the tagline "Make an Artist a Millionaire," doesn't necessarily mean that he's the artist who gets to be the millionaire.) "It's really kind of an innocent idea," he said. "The response has either been, 'Oh, this is cool,' and they give me money. Or, 'Oh, I don't get it.'"
for 140 Ways to Make a Cassette Tape Unlistenable -- Matt Sussman, SF Bay Guardian, November 4, 2008.
"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."
for Echoes of Innocence -- Rachel Howard, San Francisco Chronicle, April 15, 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."
for 24 Illustration for Franz Schubert's 'Winterreise' -- Reyhan Harmanci, San Francisco Chronicle, August 30, 2007.
"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."
for Transpose -- David Downs, East Bay Express, April 19, 2006.
"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."