Dan Finsel I Could Be Anybody. I Could Be Somebody. Dec 12, 2009 - Jan 24, 2010

DAN FINSEL, I COULD BE ANYBODY. I COULD BE SOMEBODY.

PARKER JONES is pleased to announce Dan Finsel’s debut solo exhibition, I Could Be Anybody. I Could Be Somebody. The show features a new installment to his video series, I Would Love Farrah, Farrah, Farrah…

The totality of Dan Finsel’s work is driven by a central character; one that he constructed in the Fall of 2008, and one in which he continues to embody through performance, video and various paraphernalia. This personality is an amalgamation of various media- constructed subjectivities, specifically those from popular film and television. Finsel adopts these roles and their associated narratives through the character of a schizophrenic and self-obsessed man-child. Emotionally and ethically educated through the chronicles of coming-of-age teenage melodramas, “Finsel” exists within a conflation between the logic of a Peewee Herman’s Playhouse and Andy Kaufman, reality TV and filmed studio performance art.

The central conflict in “Finsel’s” overarching narrative is his unknowing love for “Daddy.” This is emblemized through his Oedipus-like predicament involving the late Farrah Fawcett and his association with the adolescent daddy’s girl, Brenda Walsh, from the television series Beverly Hills 90210.

The psychological trauma induced by so many tempered subjectivities becomes clear as Finsel pushes Stanislavski’s method acting to the limit, often sacrificing his own personal subjectivity and confusing what is performed and what is “lived” outside of the performative. He describes his method as being a reversal to the Stanislavskian technique of affective memory and substitution, in that his aim is to arrive at original memory through the openness of another subjectivity, rather than achieving the imitation of a subject through the constrictions of original memory. Finsel believes that there is a possibility of empowerment/emotional agency in this performative act: the re-staging of original memory, through phantasy, enables one to achieve closure with the traumatic.

Dan Finsel was born in Lehighton, Pennsylvania, in 1982. He received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2009 and lives and works in Los Angeles.