Daniel Gordon: Objects at Hand
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 7, 6–8 PM
297 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY
Olney Gleason is pleased to present Objects at Hand, an exhibition of new photographs by Daniel Gordon (b. 1980, Boston). On view from May 7 through June 6, 2026, the exhibition coincides with the release of the artist's fifth monograph, published by Radius Books, with an essay by Kevin Moore and a conversation between Gordon and artist Lucas Blalock.
Gordon's working method is by now well established: images captured by the artist or sourced from the internet are printed, cut, and assembled into three-dimensional paper constructions that approximate the form of the original object. The seams remain visible; similarly the hot-glue marks and the rough texture of torn paper. There is no attempt to conceal the labor of making. These constructions are then staged, lit, and shot.
The photographs in Objects at Hand mark a departure within Gordon's practice. The artist began his recent Light Study series working exclusively in black and white – a first in his two-decade career. Stripped of the saturated color for which he is known, the photographs foreground shadow, surface, and sculptural form. They are more tightly cropped than his previous images, intimate in scale, their attention trained on the objects immediately surrounding him: glasses, kitchenware, stationery, combs, scissors. Arranged into precisely lit tableaux at once spare and visually intricate, these compositions carry the formal echoes of canonical modernist photography – the geometries and tonal precision of Edward Weston's shells and peppers, the playful object arrangements of André Kertész, the surrealist dislocations of Man Ray. Gordon's work also finds kinship with a lineage of contemporary photographic construction that stretches from Jan Groover's formalist kitchen still lifes of the 1970s through Barbara Kasten's studies of perception and geometric illusion.
Central to the series is an investigation of transparency and its illusions – a double game played between the photographs Gordon takes and the objects he makes. Many of the paper constructions he builds appear translucent in the resulting images, as though one could see through them, yet the objects themselves are entirely opaque. This contradiction, between what the eye perceives and the reality of the materials, produces what curator and writer Kevin Moore describes as "visual riddles": images that reward sustained looking and resist easy resolution. The resulting photographs are, in Moore's formulation, pictures of transparency made from opacity: pictures of pictures. As Moore writes elsewhere, the work operates by "heightening our understanding of the photograph itself as a fabrication, a distortion of the three-dimensional space it pretends to represent."
In the absence of color, the material presence of Gordon's constructions comes forward with renewed force. The sculptural dimension of the practice – paper as volume, light as carving tool – asserts itself directly, and the animating tension between the digital and the physical, between the flat screen from which the source imagery derives and the handmade object into which it is transformed, becomes the subject.
Across two decades, Gordon has built a body of work that dissolves the boundaries between photography, sculpture, and collage. Objects at Hand extends this inquiry into newly restrained territory, finding in the familiar objects of domestic life – and in the interplay of light, shadow, and surface - a sustained meditation on how images are made, how they deceive, and how, despite or because of their deceptions, they hold our attention.
Mariska Nietzman, Senior Partner at Olney Gleason, says: "We're thrilled to present these new photographs by Daniel Gordon. He has always been interested in the slippage between what is real and what is photographed, the moment when a subject becomes an object and the image folds back on itself. What strikes me about these in particular is how he achieves something so fascinatingly uncanny with the most prosaic of means."
About the artist
Daniel Gordon (b. 1980, Boston, MA) holds a BA from Bard College and an MFA from the Yale School of Art. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Solo exhibitions include Orange Sunrise with Flowers, Fruit, and Vessels, Nazarian/Curcio, Los Angeles (2024); Green Apples and Boots, Huxley-Parlour, London (2024); Free Transform, Kasmin, New York (2023); Rose Kennedy Greenway, Boston (2021-22); and Hue and Saturate, Houston Center for Photography (2019), among others. Museum exhibitions include Cut! Paper Play in Contemporary Photography, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Greater New York, MoMA PS1 (2010); and New Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2009). His work is held in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and Pier 24, San Francisco, among other institutions. Objects at Hand is Gordon's fifth monograph; a forthcoming publication with Radius Books will be released in Spring 2026.
