Just One Thing with Daniel Kent Foley

Daniel Kent Foley’s artwork “Preservation vs Retention” blurs the line between the tangible and the digital with crisp, haunting beauty. Here he shares just one thing about the piece:

“This piece came from the simplest kind of experimentation. I pressed the flowers, which I loved for their whiskers and their hue. Then I scanned them into the computer, taped to a piece of white paper so that I could easily move them while they were being scanned—I cannot help but use things a little bit different or entirely wrong, purely out of curiosity. From there, I wanted to enhance the color to better allude to the beauty of the flower when it was alive and hydrated. I was interested in the fact that the original image created was so crisp and the detail was preserved so well, and how my memory could never match it. Yet, the image doesn’t know my process nor my intentions. So I decided to play with the background to bring out the digital remnants hiding beneath the white that allude to the unnatural and minimal/almost analog way that the image was created. The resulting image speaks to the relationship I have with memory—the things I will retain will be enhanced by the filter of my perception of their beauty, but I cannot separate any such memory from the awareness that this is my tendency. Every such memory is surrounded by the cloud of doubt and confusion I instill on myself when I go flipping through the reels of positivity and nostalgia. How much of the memory is real, and how much is mythologized? And when I consider it all, in the end I seem to always land on the fact that the memory was beautiful to me from the very start, and thus—was always incredible and important.”