Dan Droz
Dan Droz was running a design firm in Pittsburgh when he made a few sculptures for his office. In 2018 a gallery owner saw photos of them and offered him a show if he made 15 more. The show opened that fall, and more than half the works sold. In 2019, nearly fifty years after graduating from Harvard, he closed the firm to work on sculpture full time. He folds his sculptures from metal, glass and wire mesh. As a teenager he was into magic, and he likes that a folded piece always hides one of its sides. His work stands at the entrance to the Museum of Art & History in Los Angeles.
Q: You ran a design firm for eighteen years and turned to sculpture full time in your late sixties. What made you make the switch?
A: When the design world evolved toward the digital, I began to look for a new direction and made a few sculptures for my office. In early 2018, an artist friend who visited the office saw these works and suggested I talk with the owner of the gallery who represented her. I showed him photos of the pieces I'd done and he told me if I could make 15 more, he would give me a show… which I did! My first exhibition opened in the fall of 2018 and sold over half of the works. In 2019, I closed my firm to devote full time to sculpture and never looked back.
Q: How did you arrive at your own ways of folding metal, glass and wire mesh?
A: Much of my 'graphic design' involved dimensional paper-folded works, as I am fascinated by the transformation of planes into 3-dimensional works. Also, I am not an experienced welder, so I developed fabrication methods that did not require welding and began experimenting with methods of fold-forming in various materials and eventually developed techniques applicable for metal, glass and polymers.
Q: You were into magic as a teenager. How much of that is in the sculpture?
A: Magic is a fascinating metaphor for our experience of the world, in that much of what is going on is intentionally concealed.
Obvious examples include marketing, politics, our personal relationships and even our understanding of ourselves. Much of my work deals with this issue of limited perception or hidden information. For example, in a folded piece, one can only view one side at a time and if folded completely, the reverse side is completely concealed. Much like a magic trick… we know something's going on that we just can't see. My work calls to mind how much we're missing and the limits of understanding what is real.
Q: You cofounded a university program in design thinking. How did that come about?
A: I was trained as a product designer and in working with other important players in the product development process such as engineers, marketing professionals and psychologists, I realized that they were not familiar with or engaged with the product design process and research methods of understanding the 'user experience.' So, as a faculty member in the CMU design department, I solicited the deans of the engineering, business and psychology departments to identify faculty who would be interested in a multidisciplinary program geared toward product design and the 'user experience' and eventually organized a course in multidisciplinary design. That course eventually led to the formation of the Integrated Design Institute at Carnegie Mellon to incorporate design methodology into other disciplines.
Q: Your pieces stand at the entrance to MOAH in Los Angeles and along the Heritage Trail in Pittsburgh. What changes when a piece gets that big?
A: Sculpture at architectural scale requires a tad more engineering input such as wind resistance, attention to weather, installation process and engineering/code requirements. I hire engineering consultants and commercial contractors to assist with compliance and installation to make sure all the requirements are met.
Q: Is there anything in the pipeline you're excited about?
A: I've recently become fascinated with the reflective qualities of mirror-polished stainless and aluminum and the use of recycled plastic with both fabricated and casting processes. Reflection adds another dimension to sculpture, creating both perception changes and the incorporation of the viewer into the sculpture. Recycled plastic calls attention to both material reuse and environmental issues.
