5. Daniel Fuller

About the artist:

As a photographer and a internationally renowned professional surfer Daniel Fuller has traveled the world and simultaneously observed and experienced with a unique perspective how the mind perceives and how the body projects through rapidly transforming visual realities within often physically life threatening situations. For his exhibition Night for Day Fuller has created images of an invisible world in a reversal of the day for night film technique to a night for day method where the moon acts as a reflector of the sun creating the resemblance of daylight and a vision of nocturnal consciousness.

Fuller shot the photographs for his Night for Day body of work between midnight and 5 am during the brightest full moon at waters edge in Hawaii and Mexico. Fuller’s long night time exposures capture the hauntingly beautiful locations such as “Insanities,” “Keiki’s,” “Three tables,” “Hanakapi’a i,” “Monster Mush,” and “Playa Las Viudas.” The choices of these spots were based on the predicted effects that the tones of the sand and the clarity and depths of water would have on the eventual exposure to moonlight. All of the work is an extension of time during which images build themselves according to the movements of natural forces. Clouds, water, and sand shift with wind to perform painterly strokes of light set against the constants of the horizon and the immovable rock formations. Here the unreality of day is built out of darkness.

Inspired by the tradition of theatrical pictorial innovation present in the landscape and seascape photography of Ansel Adams, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Andreas Gursky -Fuller has positioned his photographic practice against the notion of the decisive moment and instead creates the opportunity for the photograph to demonstrate a drawn out convergence of natural forces. The performance of creating these photos presents continuity with his surfing where stamina, projection through space and time set up an existential relationship to the resulting image. Fuller performs so nature can perform its self-painting process.

The photos become capacitors of time where light’s ability to describe perceptual space is accumulated and stored within 2 dimensions reflecting a movement toward a transcendental abstract space. Day for Night: Night for Day.

In filmmaking the Day for Night process is defined by scenes that are shot out doors during the very bright light of day using blue filters and underexposure to create the illusion of darkness or moonlight. Daniel Fuller inverts this process and sets conditions where the appearance of a nocturnal world is made through the accumulation of light and the sustained capturing of natural movement. Fuller’s photographs suggest the creation of a different human eye capable of night vision that sees the haunting appearance of the unimagined and the un-seeable. Unlike the macro unreachable phenomenon of the images of the nebula as recorded by the Hubble or the micro world as seen through an electron microscope Fuller’s pictures illuminate our one to one state of being that is all around us. Like the dark matter within Natures nocturnal architecture our perception of existence would not work with out this missing link. Fuller’s Night for Day photographs create a visual ignition point for conceptualizing that missing link.