DANE GOODMAN:

Just about everything the California artist has made over the last 40 years attests to his conviction that the best way to arrive at any knowledge worth knowing, especially when it has to do with oneself, is to figure things out for oneself—and that the quickest way to empty those discoveries of their power is to believe that they tell the whole story. Something happens when Dane makes stuff: The results of his labors become something bigger and different from the intentions present at their point of departure. There’s a sense of letting go in all of Dane’s works: not of giving up or giving in, but of giving over—from original vision to materials and process, from plan to happenstance, from willful assertiveness to the risk of trust. And that’s when the magic happens. The characters and creatures that appear in his works become vehicles not only for Dane to discover what he knows, despite what he thinks, but for viewers—of all shapes and stripes—to start to figure things out for ourselves.

The same goes for the objects and props that populate Dane’s installations, whether abstract or representational. The physicality of their surfaces and the weight of their forms, not to mention their textures and colors and compositions, endow them with the transformative power of all handmade things—evidence that things can be different if you just get to work on them, and pay attention to what happens when you lose yourself in the process. Perhaps even more than Dane’s imagistic works, his abstract ones begin in mystery—with the sense of surprise that greets us whenever we come across something we can’t identify, its unfamiliarity derailing the routine, often-mechanical process by which we comprehend things, day in and day out. All that Dane asks is that we refrain from rejecting or dismissing whatever might be unfamiliar to us and, instead, give our curiosity a few seconds, if not an entire minute, to do its thing: engage what’s right in front of us as if there may be more to it than immediately meets the eye.