Artists Registry
Brooklyn NY United States
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Artist's Statement
As an American artist born in India of French and American parents, I have traversed cultures and geography, and the abiding theme of my work is how people understand events and ideas within the context of place -- geographic, cultural, or historic.
Over the course of my practice, this concern with place has led to many site specific commissions informed by extensive collaboration and conceived and executed in a participatory process that includes architects, engineers, city planners, and end users. For many years the places I worked from were predominantly physical - a farmhouse in France, the view from the World Trade Center - but I saw my work in relation to them as an exploration of the manifestations of humanity. These places carried the ideas of the people and cultures that built and inhabited them. Paintings of places were representations of world views.
Since 2003 this interest in place has taken me into an ongoing encounter with genomics and the space of science, a ten year involvement with the Broad Institute (a genomics research institute at Harvard/MIT) and current involvement with the space of scientific research in New York. In this new body of work I have been looking at art and science as interacting fields with which we construct meaning and which together can give us insight into how knowledge is made today.
Early in my practice I imagined that the role of artists was to offer the clearest portrayal of what they saw so that the viewer could better understand, by similarity and contrast, their own way of seeing. But today, especially after more than 12 years interacting with the space of science and thinking about our larger culture, I increasingly see the world as a polyphonic space, in which each and all points of view coexist to create reality as we know it. In my public art-making, I am increasingly interested in the creation of nodal points for this meeting of views.
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Born in 1964 in Ahmedabad, India to French and American parents, Daniel Kohn was raised in France. When he moved from Paris to New York in 1996, he was working on a series of interiors of a house in the center of France, which sought to document the relation between art and the places of its making. Following his 1998 participation in World Views, a residency in the World Trade Center, Kohn's focus shifted to abstracted landscapes that sought to explore the viewer's sense of place. He has participated in numerous personal and collective exhibitions in the United States, Europe and Latin America, and has an extensive list of site-specific works, including public and private commissions and partnerships with dance, theater, and scientific organizations. Notable among these are 2 large scale public works invoking the experience of being in the World Trade Center; Seen From Above, Commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority of New York City to create a space for reflection for New Yorkers following the fall of the towers, and installed in Grand Central Terminal in September 2002, and Looking South, a 4 story painting of the view looking south from the World Trade Center, painted for Fiduciary Trust Company International, which is now part of the permanent collection of the 911 Memorial Museum.
From 2003 to 2013 he was involved with the Broad Institute for Genomic Research, where he investigated the crossovers between art and science. He is their Founding Artist in Residence and co-founder of the Viz Group. In 2013, Kohn completed Instance of a Dataset, a 7 floor commission for the Broad headquarters.
Pursuing this work at the intersection of art and science, Kohn was Artist in Residence at the Center for Epigenomics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in 2013 and 2014 and Art/Science Research Director at Ligo Project, an organization dedicated to enabling research across art and science. He also continued to make science related work for medical institutions, and is currently working on a commissioned collection of pieces for the Proton Cancer Center at Lancaster General Hospital.
In 2017 Following a National Academies of Science conference on the deep ocean, his work refocused on multidisciplinary ocean research around the question “Does the ocean have memories?” That year he was Artist at Sea with the Ocean Exploration Trust and principal investigator on two NAS grants which came out of the NAS conference. Since 2018 Daniel co-leads the Ocean Memory Project.