Texts, Quotations, Set Pieces

In his second solo presentation with Uprise Art, Texts, Quotations, Set Pieces, Dan Covert explores iconographic language through dimensional paintings and sculptures. In this new body of work, Covert leans into the human hand and his own distinctive mark-making, systematically disrupting his perfected forms with deliberate gestures of imperfection.

The foundation of Covert’s wall-based works begins with precisely CNC-milled shapes that originate from quick geometric line drawings. Working between addition and subtraction, he layers the shapes with molding paste, building up impasto and gestural surfaces, while other works are carved into directly, creating gouged, topographic expanses.

The freestanding sculptures are yet another expression of Covert’s visual vocabulary, translating his flat line drawings into three-dimensional objects able to interact with the paintings and other sculptures in the round. As viewers move through the exhibition, the sculptures create a dialogue between surface and structure, reinforcing the fluid exchange between the different dimensional spaces occupied in Covert’s practice.

Buried, excavated, and ultimately transformed through the artist’s intuitive process, these forms become quotations of themselves, echoes of past works and visual syntax that continuously expand and refract Covert’s distinct shape language.

Covert often selects processes and materials not for their analogous properties to execute an idea, but because of their deliberate ability to limit his own perfectionism and control. Instead of using a small chisel or brush to refine a detailed area in a piece, he might instead opt to use a larger, less precise tool, producing results antithetical to his initial idea and inviting chance and resistance as collaborators in the work.

Throughout the exhibition, wooden crates are transformed into architectural set pieces and support systems that hold and display the artworks, creating a secondary framework within the gallery itself. The starkness of these forms stands in tension with the raw, chainsawed tree trunks that support the sculptures and the organically manipulated surfaces of the paintings. This rigidity also recalls the originating geometry of the works themselves: simplified drawings pulled from Covert’s evolving lexicon of shapes. Buried, excavated, and ultimately transformed through the artist’s intuitive process, these forms become quotations of themselves, echoes of past works and visual syntax that continuously expand and refract Covert’s distinct shape language.

Download statement