Press Release: LaMontagne Gallery Boston, MA

Exhibition through February 22, 2025.

For well over thirty years Daniel Ranalli has been spending long summers (or more) on the Outer Cape, paying close attention to what he sees on regular walks. His work frequently involves the element of chance such as with the scrawls on an erased chalkboard, the surprising result of a photogram or the marks left by a snail in the sand. Much of his art engages directly with environmental issues. Influenced by 19th and early 20th century natural history writing, the work often becomes a kind of personal/visual natural history.

In the 1980s Daniel constructed sculptural installations made of seaweed, rocks and shells that would wash away with the next high tide. He has also made a series of unique prints memorializing specific whale strandings around the world which was shown at the New Bedford Whaling Museum and then travelled to the Ilulissat Art Museum in Greenland. In another series, Zen Dunes, he raked large Zen Gardens in the dunes of Provincetown and Wellfleet (a solo exhibition of this work is up through March at Yume Japanese Gardens in Tucson, Arizona) which would be erased by wind or rain soon after they were made.

This notion of temporality has often played a major part in his work over the years. The Snail Drawing series has engaged him for almost thirty years. It began with a series of random photographs made on the bay beaches of Wellfleet, Massachusetts of the tracks in the wet sand left by the thousands of snails at low tide. The process quickly transitioned to the before and after diptychs that are exhibited here. In these pieces Daniel has arranged the snails - often in a geometric figure – and then photographed their beginning position. The second photograph is made (usually 20 to 30 minutes later) recording the drawings the snails have made. “22 min. Snail Drawing with Foam” Photographic Diptych, archival pigment print on rag paper, 2019/20, 24”x36”, Edition: 3/10 Speaking about the work, Daniel states “I am like a choreographer whose dancers pay me no attention. I like to think of the snail pieces as a metaphor for the order we establish in our lives, and how the element of chance enters in to shape the result - regardless of how much we attempt to structure it”.

Daniel’s work is in the collections of over two dozen major museums including the MFA Boston, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian National Gallery of Art. He has had over 150 solo and group shows and multiple artist fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Massachusetts Cultural Council. He divides his time between Massachusetts and Arizona.