Based in Spain, Canogar is renowned internationally for his use of discarded electronic materials in his photography, video, sculpture and installations. Finding inspiration in the archeology of new media, he brings the dead back to life. Secrets contained beyond an object’s surface are revealed, as he constructs portraits of a society and an age. Canogar is also the creator of numerous public art installations, many of them engaging the participation of local communities, such as Waves in Houston, the world’s largest arabesque LED video sculpture; Constelaciones in Madrid at MRío Park, the largest photo-mosaic in Europe; and Travesías in Brussels, a commission for the atrium of the European Union Council in 2010
Asalto NY is a temporary public video installation projected on an abandoned factory in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY.
Occurring in two sequential phases, Asalto engages the public as both spectator and participant. A green screen is set up next to the factory, paralell to the ground. While being filmed from above, participants are invited to crawl across the horizontal green screen as if they were climbing up a wall. This filmed action is subsequently projected onto the factory facade. As the night progresses, the recordings accumulate and the number of individuals appearing in the projection increases. Eventually the industrial structure is concealed with the projection of active human forms. This artistic intervention plays with collective imagery, inviting the participants to virtually “storm” the factory, releasing our fantasies of overcoming the imposed obstacles in our lives. In this installation the artist, Daniel Canogar, engages a wide audience to critically rethink the possibilities of art. The interjection of the human form onto a abandoned industrial structure speaks to the adaptation and re-use of such spaces in the contemporary city.
“Drift” consists of videos projected onto separate cut-out spaces on the floor, reminiscent of a sewer-system or of underground rivers (such as Spain’s Guadiana River) that intermittently surface to visibility on land. The videos depict uneasy human figures drifting along a current that they cannot resist while appearing to cling to floating objects for survival. There are no three-dimensional objects present in the video-installation Drift, only the flow of images at the viewer’s feet, and the suggestion that the River of History is carrying us all into a difficult, dangerous future.
