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Daniel Silva works with materials such as mycelium, beeswax, rubber, charcoal, Japanese sailcloth and ceramics. He has done multiple art residencies in Japan, including a grant from Arts Council Tokyo to develop A Fragmented Garden, a participatory six month project that challenged the definition of a garden and used plant data to inform a site specific installation across various floors of a converted Nagaya house. Mildly Anxious Beasts, is a continuation of A Fragmented Garden and deals with a lot of the same themes and materials. His works seem to become more and more a theatre where nature and technology are intertwined, mixing their agencies so that they appear like organisms that can evolve between design and proliferation, composition and affective disorder. His art is therefore based on a narrative which is connecting nature and technology as a possibility to create liminal states and even a transmutation between different techniques.
Mildly Anxious Beasts is both the name of the show and the title of an installation. The ambiguity of the oxymoron, “mildly anxious”, and the mix of psychology and animality in the title, show that bestiality can be in men’s heads as much as beasts can be anthropomorphised in our culture. Is toxicity, madness, or an affect such as anxiety, something human? In the end, the visitor is the one connecting the works together, but also acknowledging the fragmentation of a postmodern world where soul and body, the normal and the abnormal, are disjointed.
Daniel Silva works with installations that are driven by materiality and informed by nature. Perception and contemplation play an integral role in forming a cohesion that is not led by a fixed narrative. Among the materials used by Silva are beeswax, magnets, charcoal, metal and wood, all fundamental in delivering an orchestrated interplay of emotive and referential cues.
“As a shifting, malleable substance, beeswax is central to Silva’s practice. Reflecting an interest in how a material will represent its environment, he indicates that wax produced by a given bee colony will display the characteristics and qualities of its surroundings: the flowers, season and weather conditions present when the wax was produced. As a result, beeswax is framed as the product of the swarm’s ecological relationships, the emergent result of the organization of a singular body composed by a multitude. Silva’s interest in the product of a swarm organism is echoed by his intuition towards a conception of the lived experience as a multiplicity of sensory modalities — one where sight is not privileged over touch, smell, taste or hearing.”