Rick Dailey

My sculpture, photography, and video investigates the historical traces of my enculturation. Using various media and staged environments, I both uncover and disrupt my associations with seemingly banal objects through disarming occurrences of humor, absurdity, symbolic gesture, and artifice. I am captivated by an object’s intellectual power, and I am compelled to engage in discourse with material culture to reflect and unravel the mysteries behind its authority. Sculpturally, I fabricate objects and manipulate found objects with the intention of staging a new encounter with them and their meanings. My interest in photography and video is as a formal process that captures fleeting light to produce an image – the ephemeral and contextual nature of this process parallels my interest in how objects come to signify.

Through my practice, I work to expose the process of enculturation and move beyond its confines especially as it relates to gender, sexuality, power, and authority. My work explores moral authority through the lens of mediated maleness and contemplates its effects on gender identity and defemination. Ultimately, I create situations and encounters that allow me to look outside of my historical context and reflect upon conditions that govern my own relationship with objects, memory, place, time, and perception.