Daniel Kohn
Brooklyn, NY
Daniel Kohn is a franco-american artist whose work stands at the crossroads of art and science.
MessageBorn 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.
Statement
The role of the artist is to offer a point of view so that those looking at the work may better reflect on their ways of seeing.
Until 2003 the places I painted were physical - the farmhouse in France, the view from the World Trade Center - but I saw my relation to them as exploring manifestations of humanity. Places carry the ideas of the cultures that built them, the scattering of things are traces of the people who lived there. Paintings of place are representations of World Views.
In 2003 this interest in place and ideas took me into an encounter with genomics and the space of science, a ten year involvement with the Broad Institute (a genomics research institute at MIT) and the creation of the Ocean Memory Project which I co-lead.
As an artist I am used to making leaps of intuition towards new spaces of artistic inquiry. The most recent of these leaps occurred in November 2016 when I attended the NAS conference “Discovering the Deep Blue Sea” which brought together a diversity of scientists, technologists, artists and educators, to focus their attention on the Mesopelagic zone. The working group on the microbiome and biodiversity of which I was part, came up with the fascinating overarching question: Does the Ocean have Memories? In other words, can we use the metaphor of memory to ask questions differently about the biological and physical systems of the mesopelagic? And how can interdisciplinary collaborations - including artmaking - lead to new ways of seeing and telling the stories about the ocean? This seminal encounter led to the creation of the Ocean Memory Project, which I currently co-lead.
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