Brian Dailey: Polytropos

Baahng Gallery is pleased to announce representation of Brian Dailey and the presentation of his first solo exhibition in the gallery, 'Polytropos'. The exhibition features selected works from 2010 to 2018 and debuts to a New York audience his most recent monumental project 'WORDS', an expansive global video installation engaging with issues of language and identity under globalization.

Based in Washington D.C., Dailey is an artist whose work in a range of media, including photography, film, installations, and painting, draws on his unconventional evolution as an artist and reflects pressing concerns of our times. His conceptual and performance based art expands the parameters in which he works, defying easy categorization.

Perhaps no word better characterizes Dailey than polytropos, the first adjective Homer applies to Odysseus in 'The Odyssey'. Translated from the Greek as well traveled, much wandering, and, in a more metaphorical sense, as the man of many twists and turns, polytropos suitably describes Dailey’s life journey. His many peregrinations have taken him from his art studies and career in Los Angeles in the 1970s to a twenty-year interlude working on arms control and international security, ultimately bringing him full circle back to his roots as an artist. These unusual experiences, which he approached with the same curiosity that has driven his art, provide a fertile source of inspiration in his idiosyncratic creative practice.

Dailey’s multifaceted background is reflected in works in the exhibition such as the meditative and provocative two- and three-dimensional works from his 'Lamentations series', a pioneering project that manifests a novel aesthetics of nuclear iconography in post-Cold War and in the elegant and vibrant canvases from his autobiographical '14 Stations at the Crossroads', an engaging series that revisits key moments in the artist’s life journey. Equally reflective of his life experiences are the radiant and intricate digital graphite drawings, 'Riddles', embedded with compelling multifaceted meanings. Also on view is the dynamic mosaic of photographic portraits from Dailey's 'America in Color' project, a color-coded time capsule of the myriad faces of the U.S. populace, situated literally and symbolically against a backdrop of the contemporary political landscape.

Brian Dailey has had solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, Washington, D.C., and Bulgaria, and participated in a number of group shows in the United States, Europe, and Russia. His most recent museum exhibition, 'WORDS', was held at Katzen Arts Center, American University Museum in Washington D.C. in 2018, and his mid-career retrospective took place at Bulgaria's National Art Gallery in Sofia in 2014. The evocative video 'Jikai' –which will be on view at the gallery—was screened on multiple synchronized monitors in New York City in February, 2014, as the featured video in the Times Square Midnight Moment series; a project of ART PRODUCTION FUND.