DANIELLE RANTE

Artist Biography

Danielle Rante’s work explores our personal relationships to landscape, communicating a deep sense of contemplation and awe. She has a strong dedication to working on traditional washi papers, creating large-scale yet intimate environments. Her unique approach to image-making blurs boundaries between drawing, painting, alternative photography, and print. She has participated in exhibitions nationally and internationally, notably K. Imperial Fine Art (San Francisco, CA), International Print Center New York (NY, NY), and both the China Art Museum and University of Art Museum in Shanghai. Rante has completed artist residences at Headlands Center for the Arts (Marin, CA); Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, MA); Nes (Skagastrond, Iceland); Kala Art Center (Berkeley, CA); and Jentel (Banner, WY); Arteles (Haukijärvi, Finland), among others. She is a three-time recipient of the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award and her work has been featured and reviewed in significant publications such as New American Paintings and San Francisco Arts Quarterly. She is represented by K. Imperial Fine Art in San Francisco. Rante maintains a studio in Dayton, Ohio with her two assistants, Kiki, puppy in training, and Kanga, seasoned studio veteran.

 

Artist Statement

I am interested in exploring historically idealized notions of landscape and capturing the relationships between light, land, and paper. I look for environmental shifts that feel larger than myself: subtle changes in light as the sun moves across the sky, the stark arctic contrast of Iceland, the geologic juxtaposition between rock and water. For me, these scenes and locations invite introspection and rumination on the complexities of human-place relationships, ecology and environmentalism, and the topographic history of a place.

I am particularly influenced by the landscapes of Japanese woodcut prints. The interlocking forms, gradients, and vertical structures offer viewers an invitation to meaning-making in direct counterpoint to traditional western perspective. Open areas give way to space being interpreted as both a broad swath of time and a singular moment. There is a wonder and fear built into these images often imbued with a magic from folkloric sites where deities are said to reside. My research follows in the footsteps of myriad cultures throughout history in an effort to explore the supernatural landscape as an artistic theme. From the nearby mysterious ancient mounds of the Adena people in my southwest Ohio home to the elves that inform environmental decisions in Scandinavian countries, I look for the intersections and collisions of magic and reality.

To capture my own experiences with the supernatural landscape, I work from the shadows of my memory and the spark of invention. I seek to open up the spaces I visit and inhabit without the usual cartographic markers or obvious landmarks, inviting the viewer to project their own relationship back into the image. In my large-scale works on paper, I employ the sea, space, and mountains as characters in these illusory foreign realms. Like the summit of a mountaintop or a mirage in the distance, these narratives beckon us closer but remain distant, and unattainable. I aim to reveal the dichotomy between empty and full, solid and elusive, fantasy and reality, letting the past and present manifest themselves through material, mark, and image.

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