B. 1998
polonskydanny@gmail.com
Daniel Aaron Polonsky is a research based artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He utilizes found material, collection, and fabrication to produce interventions. Using physical and digital archives, site specific documentation, and primary sources, Polonsky brings both the poetic and the political nature of materials to surface in his work. In turn Polonsky produces sculptures, moving images, and installations.
Autoethnography plays an important role in Polonsky’s various points of research, often starting from diasporic narratives that lead to unpacking larger historic and political ones. An example of a recent work, Searching for Charter Oak, 2020 - ongoing Polonsky is collecting and hoarding 1788/1999 Charter Oak Connecticut state quarters in an attempt to decirculate them from the economy. The Charter Oak tree was a sacred Native American tree and was initially planted ceremonially, it was re appropriated into the colonial narrative and now exists as an engraving on the state quarter. The act of hoarding the quarter becomes an attempted form of erasure. Alongside this action Polonsky cast enough quarters out of plaster to reproduce the etched image of the Charter Oak tree in a wall mounted installation.
In a separate work, Polonsky conducted research in Russia that led to seeing the first hand effects of censorship and classification there. Classification and Censorship were described by Artist Ilya Dolgov in their interviews as rooted deep in Russia’s culture. This led him to work with residents and activists on Kanonersky Ostrov in Saint Petersburg, a marginal area that faces negative ecological impacts from surrounding architectures and neglect from the local government. Polonsky produced three dimensional renderings that appropriated the aesthetics of architectural proposals often used for new construction. Titled, An Orchestra of Silence for Kanonersky Ostrov in which oversized instrument mutes would be installed on the western high speed diameter. They would function to both silence and barricade the roadway, proposing the instrument as a metaphor for the motorway.
Polonsky received his BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art in 2020/21. He has exhibitied at 6base Gallery, Bronx, New York, Anthology Film Archives, New York, 41 Cooper Gallery, New York, and 19 Devyatnadsat Gallery, Moscow. He runs self initiated curatorial project Rogue Car Gallery, and was a recipient of the Benjamin Menschel Fellowship in 2019.