Emerging contemporary artists - selected so you don't have to...

Daniel Turner

Practice: sculpture / installation

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For the last few years, work by NYC-based artist Daniel Adam Turner has been steadily infiltrating the American contemporary scene.

He's yet to achieve quite the same degree of recognition elsewhere, but with galleries such as London's prestigious 'White Cube' rumoured to have shown interest in his representation, this is just a matter of time.

Relatively recent process-driven pieces share a spare, grimily gritty aesthetic, and include the still-linear remnants of a shattered fluorescent light tube, or wire-wool wall rubbings that approximate the scuffings of human traffic (inspired, apparently, by Turner's time as a museum attendant at the New Museum, where leaning was strictly NOT allowed).

Although such interventions into time and space have become his best-known works, they emerge organically from an earlier sculptural practice which was more physically substantial, yet equally concerned with by-products of process.

Examples include coal-based tar sandwiched between sheets of plastic: works which retain both mutability and a whiff of their petroleum innards.

Soot - another form of carbon - is used to blacken objects or produce a literal sfumato effect on plexiglas panels.

Other pieces, such as 'The Soft East', which artfully transforms silver wrapping paper into sinister-looking halberds, conform less easily to established themes and materials, but provide reassuring evidence of a practice able to successfully divert from potential dead-ends and over-egged tropes.