DANIEL CALLIS
Daniel Callis (born in Long Beach, CA) is an artist and educator living in Southern California. He grew up an hour southeast of Los Angeles surrounded by orange groves, kidney shaped swimming pools, and historic Spanish Colonial Revival architecture. His childhood was immersed in the visual richness of the SoCal semi-desert coastal landscape, surf & car culture, and Hanna-Barbera and Looney Tunes cartoons. Callis received his BS in Drawing & Painting from California State University, Fullerton. He received his MFA from Claremont Graduate University which culminated with Callis receiving the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Graphic Arts Council’s, Young Talent Award.
Working within a variety of media and visual traditions, Daniel Callis’s artwork speaks into personal and cultural histories that are continually updated, altered, discarded, reexamined, deconstructed and reconstructed. His work explores the poetics found at the intersection of materials, and process. The work is derived out of evolving practices, evidenced by labored surfaces of accumulation. Each work archives conversations between method and material, structure and concept.
Daniel’s teaching experience includes a decade working in special needs communities, Cypress Community College, Mt. San Antonio College, Azusa Pacific University and University of Southern California. He currently teaches at Biola University where he is a professor of drawing, painting and transdisciplinary studies.
In addition to his individual studio practice, Callis has collaborated extensively, including partnering with individuals with physical and developmental disabilities, working with a field biologist in Baja, Mexico, a sociologist in Las Vegas, and a theologian from Duke Divinity School, a poet/musician from Orange county and a performance artist / puppeteer from Rhode Island. His latest collaboration is a multi-artist response to the music of American Composer, Morten Lauridsen.
A STATEMENT
Disruption, displacement partnered with themes of growth, and regeneration are the themes driving Callis’ work. He explores ancient Judeo / Christian traditions of resurrection, regeneration, reconciliation and redemption. The works acknowledge the paradoxical coexistence of success and failure, disruption and regeneration, of tragedy and celebration. There is an evidenced embodied history of the destructive and regenerative action accumulated in the surfaces of each painting.
About his work Callis states:
“What has become increasingly important is the relationship between the painting as a physical entity and a transcendent metaphoric object. There is the subject of the hand, of color, of the paint itself. There is also the subject of poetic image.”
