M.F.A., (video/photography) University of Hartford, CT, 1976
B.F.A., (painting/photography) The Atlanta College of Art, GA, 1973

My work has developed along two divergent but conceptually consistent paths. One contains my private work—essentially explorations of psychological content dealing with identity and the location of consciousness in the creative process. The other includes public work—essentially transactions within the art infrastructure including curatorial and critical work. I have always envisioned these two paths as parallel, equal in value, and interchangeable; my attitudes formed early—the result of my interest in Conceptualism with its emphasis on process and de-emphasis of the object.

While public work has been the most consistent and widely recognized aspect of my art, it is my private work that has provided the greatest personal clarity and sustenance. Much of my early private work involved the exploration of exhibition conventions in an attempt to subvert normal exhibition boundaries and advance the alternative perception of exhibition as meta-art. These pieces eventually metamorphosed into site-specific works incorporating spoken words, audio/video technologies and written text.

Further playing on the relationship between art and language, I developed strategies for exploring my personal psychological makeup; my pieces evolved into mechanisms for locating, abstracting and presenting my personal anxieties and idiosyncrasies. The text in these pieces often consisted of short repeated interrogative and declarative phrases that suggested ambiguous and often contradictory meanings (e.g., "you may leave at any moment...") But, in the late '70s, the emotional content of this work proved to be too personally volatile and I instead began to direct my energies toward "public" projects including the Atlanta Art Workers Coalition and Art Papers. My earlier pieces on the nature of the exhibition experience (the nature of art) enabled me to recognize and utilize the gallery and the art journal as alternative communication tools—specialized vehicles ideally suited to social and political agendas.

In the early '80s, I experienced a period of personal crisis accompanied by the total disintegration of my will to produce. I directed my scarce energies toward journal keeping. Daily writing grew out of the necessity to radically alter my life; it quickly became a personal tool for transformation that allowed me to continue to explore essential issues, but in a more controlled and therapeutic manner: artifice gave way to articulation. Journaling bridged a gap and provided safe passage to a very productive period in my public art life. Exhibitions again became fertile ground for the exploration of issues including AIDS, aging, technology, the environment and a host of related themes.

Since the late '80s, I have closely guarded my private art-making. I have gone through intensely creative periods only to have them offset by long spells of inactivity. More often than not, the work that was produced during the active phase of the cycle was unceremoniously discarded a few days after it was completed. My reluctance to exhibit began to abate somewhat in the early '90s when I created a site-specific installation entitled The Map is Not the Territory—a meditation on the relationship of the mind of the artist to the hand of the artist. This piece encapsulated the ambivalence, anxiety, and the sense of awe that has always been central to my creative process. The primary visual focus of the installation was a line of text scrawled onto the gallery wall: "he stumbled, he fell, he eventually realized that the map is not the territory... "

In the last ten years, I have become very involved in digital technologies and have once again began producing on a regular basis. My new pieces find form primarily as photoworks and single-channel video projects.

—drt (revised February, 2007)

Mailing Address:
Dan R. Talley, Professor
Fine Arts Department
Kutztown University
Kutztown, Pennsylvania 19530-0730   USA