Five on the First

April 2025
Christopher Daharsh

Christopher Daharsh (b. 1990, Omaha, NE) lives and works in Queens, NY.

“My practice is a visual filter to my pedestrian and nomadic experiences in natural and built environments. I am searching for a source of empathy within my environment through crowd sourced mark making and the slow hand of geological time. This search finds its roots in constellations of blackened gum peppering sidewalks, sprouting mussels reclaiming an abandoned dock, and other contours of the landscape we inhabit.

Field observations for my work are made through photography, frottage, and the collection of objects. Using drawings, paintings and assemblage sculpture as a conduit, I transcribe these observations in the studio, making larger composites. I feel like an ant while making such works; my choices in the studio can be reduced to moves made by following pheromone trails, unconscious as individual decisions but sentient through their emergence as a whole. There is a tendency in my works to elicit a rippling pattern, one of small quadrants and swirls, evocative of mollusk shells, light shimmering on waves, and other natural patterns.

My works, in addition to searching for it, act to elicit empathy. Their anthropomorphizing of a battered landscape and personification of the midden, or archeological trash heap, and mashing of “man-made” and “natural” components approach a host of environmental and psychological concerns.”

CV