As an American artist born in India of French and American parents, I have traversed cultures and geography, and the abiding theme of my work is how people understand events and ideas within the context of place — geographic, cultural, or historic.
For many years the places I worked from were predominantly physical – a farmhouse in France, the view from the World Trade Center – but I saw my work in relation to them as an exploration of the manifestations of humanity. These places carried the ideas of the people and cultures that built and inhabited them. Paintings of places were representations of world views.
Since 2003 this interest in place has taken me into an ongoing encounter with the space of science, a ten year involvement with the Broad Institute (a genomics research institute at Harvard/MIT) and current involvement with transdisciplinary research in the form of a collaborative research project on Ocean Memory funded by the NAS.
For me aesthetics are tightly linked to cultural history, ecology, and processes of inquiry. Collaborations across disciplines have enabled me to create paintings that reflect a world in flux and I have come to view the process of image-making as something that must continually evolve. If I am open to experimentation and expanding what painting is, then my work has the capacity to both reflect reality and offer new ways of looking.

Daniel Kohn