Daniel Rich

I translate photos into paintings that call attention to implicit political and social narratives transcribed in the built environment. The architectural image is represented to introduce a dialogue about changing political power structures, failed utopias, the impacts of ideological struggles, war and natural upheavals. I am interested in the highly symbolic role architecture plays in politics and its power to function as an icon of our lived experience, a portrait of an existential phenomenology whose features manifest where society is at one particular moment in history. My paintings point to the shifting of the significance and meaning in both images of places and the places themselves. The potential divergence and duality of images and the media’s role in covering and presenting issues to the public is closely tied to a pictorial architecture, and its ability to act as an icon for political, religious and social systems and belief.