King & Clown: Dan Estabrook

January 16, 2015 – March 21, 2015  

In King & Clown, NYC-based artist Dan Estabrook combines nineteenth and early twentieth-century photographic processes with painting and drawing to produce his uniquely contemporary works. In Brain Surgery—an image in which the artist is also the model—a hovering ovoid form, painted in gouache and a pencil grid, is rendered atop a gum bichromate print, a photographic process developed in the 1850s. Through his uncanny juxtaposition of subjects and the deceptively-aged appearance of his images (achieved through meticulous hand-painting), Estabrook evokes a sense of mystery and nostalgia. “My images begin by imitating various academic genres of the nineteenth-century, mostly still lifes and figure studies, but ones made strange by my interventions on the surface or by the handmade objects set before the camera,” says Estabrook.

“Drawing mostly from self-portraits made over a 20 year period, including photographs and sculptures made specifically for this exhibition, the work in King & Clown shows the many ways in which I have constructed and inhabited my own artistic persona.” he concludes.