Daniel Turner
30 May – 25 August 2024
Downtown Los Angeles
For his debut solo exhibition with Hauser & Wirth, New York-based artist Daniel Turner presents works created by salvaging, transforming and recontextualizing materials extracted from the Mandalay Generating Station, a decommissioned power plant located 60 miles northwest of Downtown Los Angeles. Established in the mid-20th century, the Southern California Edison-operated facility supplied the region’s electricity needs through natural gas-powered thermoelectric generation until its closure in 2017. Turner’s transformation of remnants from the electrical plant into a series of paintings, drawings, sculptures and film echoes a calibrated process of material distillation and site-responsive reflection.
Turner’s practice is driven by the conviction that physical objects are inherently imbued with the emotional, psychological and historical contexts from which they were employed. His examination of the properties of alloys has led to large-scale paintings and works on paper that utilize copper elements extracted from the Oxnard site. Once removed, these components were spliced through an intricate milling process into refined copper wools. Subsequently, these wools were methodically burnished into the surfaces of canvases, resulting in achromatic veils within his picture planes.
In the sculpture ‘Channel Conduit’ (2024), a coiled arrangement of materials stripped from the plant’s infrastructure—that once facilitated the induction of seawater for temperature regulation—are now positioned as conduits for perceptual consideration. Surface textures illuminate the merits of metallurgical compositions once vital to the power plant’s operational systems. Isolated and recomposed, these objects invite reflection between technology, temporality and the invisible elements that environ our immediate consciousness.
A series of vitrines containing schematics, found archival materials and small-scale sculptures provide a traceable lineage of data collection, system processes and procedures fundamental to the functionality of the decommissioned site.
Turner’s latest film ‘Oxnard Harbor’ (2024) features aerial footage captured via drone orbiting the vacated generating station. Set against the dramatic backdrop of the Pacific Ocean, the vast architecture points to the facility’s once substantial production of electricity for the greater Los Angeles region.
ON VIEW IN DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES
‘Daniel Turner’ is on view now through 25 August 2024 at Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles. Please visit our location page to plan your visit.
About the Artist
Daniel Turner
Daniel Turner (b. 1983 in Portsmouth, VA; lives and works in New York) works primarily in sculpture, involving the creation or manipulation of materials, objects, and environments into tactile or atmospheric forms. These forms are often characterized by a specific response to an environment under a controlled set of processes. This approach enables Turner to base form on transposition, preserving a sensory link to geographical locations, cultural associations, and human contact. These elements appear in earlier works in which an entire waiting room is cast into a series of solid bars, a psychiatric facility is burnished to a darkened stain against an exhibition wall, or a cafeteria is dissolved across the expanse of a floor.
The artist has sourced materials from sites including American power plants, Japanese chemical tankers, and Belgian prisons. In 2019, Turner extracted one metric ton of hospital beds from the Vinnitsa Regional Psychoneurological Hospital in Vinnitsa, Ukraine, which were archived, melted, and recast into two solid forms. For his solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel (2022), Turner extracted elements from three sites in the Basel region that triangulate architecture, the pharmaceutical industry, and psychology. These materials included several tons of heating radiators and oil tanks removed from the interiors of the chemical plant BASF, the pharmaceutical labs of Novartis, and the former psychiatric facility Holdenweild. Material excavated from each site was melted into minimal forms and burnished into the surface of large-scale works on canvas.
Daniel Turner has participated in numerous institutional exhibitions including Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; The Chinati Foundation, United States; Musée de l’Orangerie, France; Palais de Tokyo, France; The Pinchuk Art Center, Ukraine; Kunstmuseum Krefeld, Germany; Museen Haus Esters und Haus Lange, Germany; Musée des Arts Contemporains Grand Hornu, Belgium; The Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France; Muzeul de Artă Cluj-Napoca, Romania; The Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Poland; The Mori Art Museum, Japan; and Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Belgium.
Turner’s works are held in private and public collections including SMAK Ghent, Belgium; Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland; Centre Pompidou, France; FRAC Bretagne, France; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France; ICA Miami, United States; and Musée des Arts Contemporains Grand Hornu, Belgium, among others.
Current Exhibitions
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