Artist Statement

Daniel Mock heard that Bertrand Russell once in a lecture proved that he was the pope starting from the statement ‘0=1’. By saying that if zero equals one than one equals two so he and the pope were the same person. This nature of being able to prove anything starting from an illogical place is how Mock has come to view ‘his’ experience in that Church that one Sunday in the salad days of ‘his’ youth. Like the tower of babel, logic built upon illogic results in ‘damnation’. Mock is interested in notions of righteousness, guilt, shame, etc. ‘He’ seeks to transmute ‘his’ experience into the larger ‘American’ puzzle, as ‘he’ thinks a seed of this idea is omnipresent across all lines of dogma and structural violence of our society. ‘He’ seeks to untangle and rectangle these issues in ‘his’ art.

Bio

My interdisciplinary art practice has many tangential ideas but primarily stem at the moment from exploring one experience I had growing up, specifically growing up Catholic. When I was about ten years old I was in church on Sunday with my family as we were weekly. During the communal recitation of ‘the creed’ (“Forgive me father I have sinned through my own fault, in what I have done and what I have failed to do…”), I got lost in a train of thought about how I could not think of a sin I had committed. Following this logic, in light of desperately wanting to feel truly part of this communal activity, I concluded that I should sin so that then I would have something to confess for. Thus, would honestly be part of the communal activity of seeking forgiveness. I participated in the 80 WSE rendition of Beethoven’s Magic Flute. This is the genealogy in which I wish to orient my practice. Fuck lineage, but remember.

Daniel Mock’s work was featured in “When A Digital Surface Meets A Mutable Apparatus…” curated by Regina Harsanyi.