An artist and a professor with the Department of Visual Arts, Daniel Laskarin’s practice is object based, materially and philosophically rooted; it investigates our experience of images as a form of thought and of objects as other bodies, which in art may give sensory experience to consciousness. 

His approach encompasses diverse media, drawn from industrial materials and processes, sometimes incorporating photography, video, optics, robotics, installation and sound. As well as both national and international gallery exhibitions, he has been involved with set design, public image projections and large scale public art commissions around the Pacific Northwest.

About Song For My Father
“I modified a small accordion so that it only made the sound of breathing (or for a more recent reference, the bellows of a ventilator). I “played” that accordion, breathing for my father, for a 5 hour uninterrupted period at Deluge Contemporary Art here in Victoria. The act of doing it, a meditation, a contemplation, a ritual, helped me make peace with my memory of that past relationship and with my Dad’s death. I installed a player for the performance video and a set of speakers in the drawers of a steel tool chest that my father had built for himself, and on its top-mounted a deconstructed video panel through which the video of my playing the breathing accordion can be seen. The video loops, the sound emerges from within his tool chest. I completed this work a few months before the current covid pandemic, but the breathing sound seems right for what we are going through now. Although Dad died long before covid, I think his death, after his long struggle to keep breathing, especially resonates today. The playing of the accordion is mechanical, but also human, the sound matched my own breathing as I played.” Daniel Laskarin