This article is part of Hyperallergic‘s Pride Month Seriesfeaturing an interview with a different emerging or mid-career transgender or non-binary artist each weekday throughout June.
Daniel Boccato’s fiberglass and epoxy resin sculptures appear both heavy and light; sleek and rambling; serious and self-deprecating. Many of Boccato’s earlier pieces involved analyzing images and objects, extracting their outlines and rendering those outlines unrecognizable in the form of wall pieces evoking distorted faces or mushrooms or the form a feeling might take – anything but what they once were. The Brazilian-born, New York-based artist, who identifies as non-binary and uses it with his pronouns, eases the constraints on our recognizable visual lexicon by emptying and rejigging it, lending it lightness and possibility. Below, Boccato discusses a new series of sculptures informed by ghosts and the delightful tension between spectral and material existence, and cries out inspirations ranging from etymology and animism to The Powerpuff Girls.
Hyperallergic: What is the current orientation of your artistic practice?
Daniel Boccato: I am currently working on an exhibition at Magenta Plains in September 2023 which will feature two bodies of work: ghosts and lions. Lions I started in 2018, and ghosts are new. I’ve been developing them for about two years and I’m very happy to have this opportunity to share them. I work with curved, wavy, and curvy shapes, crafting them with fiberglass and epoxy resin, then spray painting them with automotive paint. They hang from the wall supported by steel pipes, appearing to float in front of the viewer. The tension between the concept of a ghost and something that is ultimately fixed and grounded in material reality fascinates me. I try to capture shape-shifting identities and fix them, crystallizing their form with rigid industrial materials. Not to control them, to dominate them conceptually, to apprehend them and pin them down; I want to play with form, animate and be animated by these forms.
H: In what ways, if any, does your gender identity play a role in your experience as an artist?
comics: Although my work does not literally or directly address the tick marks of my identity on paper, I do think the fluidity of my gender identity, and what that means for the perception and way I understand the world around me , is present in my art. The works I create are the result of who I am and the accumulation of my experiences. The two things being inextricably linked, I don’t feel the need to sprinkle autobiographical signs throughout my work. There’s a lot of ego for everyone, most of my job is to keep myself out of it.
H: Which artists inspire your work today? What are your other sources of inspiration?
comics: Music, walking down the street, going out, dancing, talking to peers, language, etymology, building and destroying jokes, watching how things are built, building and making things, YouTube videos from other makers, Cocteau Twins, Harold Budd , Kaari Upson, Al Freeman, Ivy Pham, Molly Rose Lieberman, Iris Touliatou, space jam, The Powerpuff Girls, MulaneFrances McDormand, Lisa Cholodenko, seeing people talking to each other and understanding each other, seeing people talking to each other and not understanding each other at all, reading and thinking about artificial intelligence, seizing the moment when I realize I was wrong or understand something different from what was said, blade runner (both the original and 2049), orange smog from wildfires in Canada, Fiona Alison Duncan, Natasha Stagg, Mary Gaitskill, Philip K. Dick, the view from my roof that offers spectacular sunsets over the darkest and most dystopian view of the city that I can imagine, The Emerald podcast and talks about animism, and how everything is connected and teeming with life.
H: What are your hopes for the LGBTQIA+ community right now?
I hope we can all achieve an ideal balance between selling and staying real.
