ARTIST BIO
Daniel Callahan is a multimedia artist, filmmaker and designer. Merging a legion of disciplines including painting, digital photography, film, music, writing and performance, Daniel works to craft immersive experiences incorporating story, ritual, and the human form to explore aspects of resilience and mysticism.
Best known for his painterly technique of MassQing - a ritual painting of the face used to reveal rather than conceal one’s inner essence - Daniel and his work have been featured at the Museum of Fine Arts, The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art, The New Orleans Museum of Art and the Queens Museum, as well as in publications such as Believer Magazine, The Bay State Banner, and Words Beats & Life: The Global Journal of Hip-Hop Culture.
Daniel is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design where he received a Bachelors of Applied Science in Fine Arts and Africana Studies, and Emerson College where he received a Masters in Fine Arts in Film and Video. Daniel is a recipient of the Donor Circle for the Arts Grant, the New England Foundation for the Arts Creative City Grant, a Mass Cultural Council's CYD Teaching Artists Fellow and a Creative Entrepreneurship Fellow of the Greater Boston Arts & Business Council.
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Photo by: Jonathan Turner
MASSQ WORK
ARTIST
STATEMENT
MASSQ
[ masque, mahsk ]
A MassQ is a ritual application of paint to the face in order to reveal one's inner state of being.
The alternative spelling of MassQ is to differentiate it from our common notion of a mask as a tool used to hide, and/or conceal one's identity. The purpose of a MassQ is not to hide or conceal but to reveal the truth that is within.
MASSQING
[ the creation of a MassQ ]
MassQing derives from the ancient tradition of body decoration practiced by nearly every indigenous culture on earth.
In using the face as a canvas, MassQing is a ritual that requires all participants (artist, subject and viewer) to engage each other face to face; transforming people into art and art into people.
YEAR OF THE MASSQ
MassQ art by Daniel Callahan
MassQ art by Daniel Callahan
Daniel Callahan MassQing at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
MassQ art by Daniel Callahan
YEAR OF THE MASSQ
SUBJECTS
Year of the MassQ, (YOTM for short), is an ongoing collaborative portrait series that uses the art and ritual of MassQing as a platform to engage and feature innovators, creatives and leaders from Daniel's community. Hailing from a wide variety of industries and professions Daniel's subjects share their spaces, faces, stories and ideas for a unique, cross disciplinary collaborative portrait series based on the subjects of identity communion and change - the three core concepts of the MassQ.
