Dan Piersinaru – Essay about preservation

www.danpiersinaru.ro, www.piersinaru.com and on Facebook

Dan Piersinaru has been living and working in Bucharest since 2004. In a city at once so convoluted and vibrant, Pierºinaru’s work searches for the undercurrents of human relationships. Working almost exclusively in photography, Piersinaru examined the relationship we have to our selves, to others like or unlike us, and to our environment. In an early series entitled ‘Essay About Preservation’, we are given a chance to interact with ourselves; with memories, or with keepsakes, preserved out of a need to beat the destructive intentions of time or to satisfy a sort of curiosity.

“How many times are we really ‘inside’? Most often we are content to look from the exterior at the people around us, to examine the world, life…
The jar – a normal (common) object that creates its own space. An object space in which we can enter realms of enigma, absence, memory, exchange, ideas, artificiality and stylization of dreams.

A pedestrian object like the jar transcends its functional role and becomes a tool for introspection if one takes the time to look and examine What it holds; we are forced to consider our own desires: the desire to preserve something in its present state for later use, for later viewing, for later study or examination, for pleasure, for the sake of fascination and for the satisfaction of controlling the omni-powerful process of decay. Along with preservation for the sake of memory, one must admit the impetus to implement captivity. Its contents are totems of our own desires, likes and fascinations as well as material testaments of our actions and abilities.

Visually tense and conceptually challenging, the images take these totems, and our fascinations with them, and attempt to call on our notion of captivity and entrapment. An egg placed in a jar, while its nest stands above as a lid, is (at best) out of place; it is as absurd as it is cruel. The watery blue of the blank backdrop does not mitigate the discomfort this image inspires, it heightenes it. Each image in the series examines the notion of entrapment in a transparent, contained space.

The jar holds only the transparent space it creates within its circumference, until an object is placed in it. Once this occurs we can no longer think of a relationship between objects and space, but rather must consider a relationship between objects and persons. The jar transforms into a telling display case, betraying our desires, fascinations, memories and pretenses. The transparent container is now a surface reflecting back a piece of our own image (characteristic).”

text by Andra Moldav

more images and more interesting projects on the artist’s website