Zen Dunes
by Daniel Ranalli
January 2 through March 31, 2025
The Zen Dune series came about after travelling to Asia and experiencing its deep traditions of temporal art. The pieces in this exhibition were made on Cape Cod and in County Mayo, Ireland over a number of years. They began when I decided to sweep clean a large sandy bowl in the dunes of Province-town where we were staying in one of the historic and primitive shacks by the sea. Once it was free of footprints, I picked up a nearby rake and began to create a Zen garden. It was a very tranquil process – first imagining the shapes within the contours of the dune, and then making what was essentially a large drawing. Both the raking and the photographing of the piece was a very contemplative process as I used a large format view camera on a tripod. These gardens would soon be erased by nature.
Although largely situated within the medium of photography, my work is often characterized as conceptual and/or environmental. The work is frequently rooted in the balance between control and chance – such as the unforeseen results in the photogram, the found scrawls on a classroom chalkboard or the path of a snail in wet sand.
Daniel Ranalli has been working as a visual artist for over 45 years. His work is in the permanent collections of over thirty museums here and abroad including the Museum of Modern Art (NY), Museum of Fine Arts Boston, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Harvard Art Museums, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, List Art Gallery (MIT) and National Gallery of American Art (Smithsonian). He has been included in over 150 solo and group shows in the U.S. and abroad and has been the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and multiple fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
In 1993 he founded the Graduate Program in Arts Administration at Boston University where he taught until 2015. He also wrote extensively on artist issues for several publications in the 1980s and 1990s.
His exhibition “Whale Stranding” at the New Bedford Whaling Museum (MA) traveled to the Ilulissat Art Museum in Greenland and will travel to additional venues in 2025.
Daniel and his wife, the artist Tabitha Vevers, have been part time residents of Tucson for the past four years. Dan also sits in as an occasional vocalist with the band Sensible Shoes.
ARIST RECEPTIONS ON JANUARY 24, 2025 - 5:30PM-7PM