Daniel Mirer

Artist Biography:
Daniel Mirer currently resides in Brooklyn New York where he works as an artist/photographer and educator. Mirer received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute and his Master of Fine Arts in Photography from the California Institute of the Arts. Mirer has participated in numerous artist-in-residency programs including the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program, the Bronx Museum of the Arts’ Artists in the Marketplace, and the the Starry Night Artist Residence in New Mexico. Mirer was also the recipient of the New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for photography and the Dana Artist Fellowship for continuing education. Along with other international artists, he has recently received two grants from the German government, Kunststiftung (Art Foundation) North Rhine Westphalia & Landesverband Westfalen-Lippe (Foundation for the Region of Westfalia-Lippe to begin the creation of a body of work titled “Thingstätten in Deutschland.”

Mirer’s artwork is part of museum and institution collections including The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Fidelity Investments in Boston, Massachusetts, and the Ohio State University. Mirer has taught photography at institutions including Fashion Institute of Technology, Brooklyn College, Ramapo College and Ohio State University. In Europe, Mirer was an Adjunct Instructor of Photography at Tampere Polytechnic School of Art & Media as well as Webster University, Netherlands.

Statement:
Thingstätten (Thing cult) is a term used to define open-air Nazi cult theaters built between the years of 1933-1945 for the specific intention of rallying, politicizing, and entertaining local communities. The staged productions were designed to propagandize an idealistic reinterpretation of Germanic history and used as a recruitment setting for the National Socialist Party.

The Thingsteads used impressive architecture and scenic places whose locations were selected by the notion of historic idyllic Germanic surroundings. The fascist government developed these locations to portray a tribal past that was built in isolated natural landscapes such as wooded areas, near bodies of waters, nestled in hills or unique rock formations as well near traces of historical Germanic ruins.

The photographic & video research project documents the Thingstätten locations in Poland and Germany which I use to explore my interest in mythical topographies of architectural space. These architectural portraits are places of lost memories that illustrate a primary function of the still photographic image, to record. The photographs represent an ideal within a cultural influence where romantic constructions of landscape design and architecture are created for the idyllic and where the interpretation of power or influence in political ideologies are shown as indented propaganda tools through architectural idealism.

Through my photography I am documenting how architectural idealism and the interpretation of power and influence in political ideology are projected as propaganda. Using visual and conceptual traditions, the photographs depict sites that are familiar; picturesque landscapes that depict a lost history deprived of its intention or purpose. The Thingstätten locations are all but abandon, forgotten, or have been repurposed for contemporary use. I intentionally photograph these locations from a distance to include the entire landscape of the space which creates a melancholic state allowing myself and the viewer to embark on a social critique of forensic architecture. Beyond public memories, the images begin to portray spaces in which a building façade or its locations are indistinguishably lost to time; blurred into a monumental dissolution of lost architectural space and history.

Artist website: www.danielmirer.com