Dan John Anderson at Night Gallery

Dan John Anderson, Threshold (2025). Cedar, stained glass, and aluminum, 102 × 72 × 29.5 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery. Photo: Ed Mumford.

July 12–August 23, 2025

My first impression of Dan John Anderson’s exhibition at Night Gallery was olfactory. A warm, resinous scent lingered in the space—redolent of cedar or petrichor—bringing a sensory simulacrum of the natural world into an otherwise white cube room, conferring a sense of ceremony. The ambrosial scent emitted by Anderson’s amorphous and often monumental carved wood sculptures indexes the technical process of their creation, which involves fastidiously torching the sculpted wood, blackening its veneer. Standing amongst these objects and registering their burnt fragrance, more akin to incense than charcoal, reminded me of catching the fleeting aromas of plant life in the wilderness—earthy scents rife with the sublime. As the body registers scent through the physical inhalation of molecules, to smell an artwork is to quite literally consume it, which in this instance felt like a sacramental anointment. Here, by invoking the sensual, malleable, and often enigmatic material properties of earthen matter—and in turn nodding to natural sculptural processes such as erosion and petrification—Anderson’s objects ultimately posit the organic as a quality of the divine, a quality heightened by the exhibition’s encoded references to worship and ritual.

Anderson, who lives and works in California’s High Desert, created the five sculptures in his exhibition Relic, Reliquary, Requiem in his Yucca Valley studio, where he predominantly works outside. As such, these objects—four large, carved wood sculptures with variously charred surfaces, plus one smaller totemic shape cast in bronze—read as formal extensions of the natural desert landscape, home to a panoply of strange lifeforms and globular rock masses hewn by time. In the gallery, they occupied the middle of the room, forming a staggered circle that naturally drew the viewer into the center, as if the works were engaging in ceremonial communion. Together (and perhaps partly due to the physicality of their creation), Anderson’s objects recalled the dismembered and scattered appendages of a large sculptural body: a monumental pair of singed hands (Threshold, all works 2025), an erect shard of bone (Sentinel), and a disembodied head with patinated bronze eyes (Terra Seer). Their uncanny silhouettes were enhanced by their undulating, rippling surfaces, byproducts of Anderson’s reductive sculptural process, which includes eroding the wood grain with a wire brush, revealing the cellular structures and underlying growth rings of the original trees themselves—an effect that frames elemental change over time as an extant property of the work. Standing in the middle of these often-imposing objects aroused the perception of being perceived—a sense of reciprocal looking that recalled a mirage that I’ve often experienced in my own time in the desert, where groves of muscular trees can suddenly mime as forests of humanoid forms.

The sense of embodiment that pervades these works (in conjunction with their loose circular installation) lent the entire exhibition a ritualistic air, a quality amplified by the show’s title, which positioned the sculptures as elegies or relics—perhaps ancient ones, given their intrinsic connections to the prehistoric desert landscape. The inclusion of nonorganic materials such as stained glass, an ancient form of adornment now predominantly associated with Gothic cathedrals (Threshold), and lit beeswax candles, stalwart ceremonial tools (Seven Sisters), cemented the exhibition’s esoteric, liturgical undertones. Threshold particularly embodies these associations. Straddling figuration and abstraction and carved from two massive, blackened cedar trunks, the work takes the shape of two hands reaching skyward, as evidenced by the presence of ten finger-like digits. A hexagon-shaped hole, plugged by luminous segments of ruby and crimson stained glass, appears below the fingers of each upright hand, precisely where the palms would be. These voids pierce the works from front to back, a gesture that simultaneously suggests a window and a wound, specifically the stigmata, a mark of holiness inflicted upon the flesh. With this material nod to an esoteric phenomenon, the sculpture-as-body enacts the myth of the divine, invoked here as an elemental force of nature. At over eight feet tall, Threshold was the exhibition’s most monumental work; from a distance, its stained-glass wounds resemble a pair of gleaming eyes, mirroring the ones in the more overtly figurative Terra Seer and positioning the work as the exhibition’s presiding monastic presence.

Adorned with seven burning candles, Seven Sisters nods to the tools of ritual while also introducing the element of time, much like the works’ embedded tree rings. In this sculpture, carved from a single walnut specimen, seven tentacular limbs extend upward from the top of a charred, tubular trunk, its sinuous shape reminiscent of the highly anthropomorphic desert trumpet plant, native to the Mojave. Each tentacle cradles a honey-colored candle, which over time dripped down onto the rich black wood, creating rivulets of improvisational marks that echo the gestural vocabulary of the larger sculpture. While the burning flame and melting wax index the passage of time in the gallery, the collected works themselves reference natural geologic processes that occur over unfathomably long timeframes, such as erosion (a reductive force echoed by Anderson’s own subtractive techniques) and petrification. Terra Seer, for example, recalls the silhouette of a wind-whipped boulder, while Mutation, the only entirely bronze work in the show, bears a striking resemblance to petrified wood, its living form eternally calcified. Ultimately, Anderson’s rituals of making, which he has referred to as improvisational collaborations with his materials, mirror the improvised rituals of the natural landscape itself, continuously sculpted by elemental forces so astounding as to appear divine. Imbuing the natural aspects of his materials with formal references to ritual, spirituality, and communion, Relic, Reliquary, Requiem hinted at the mystical potential of terrestrial matter, emphasizing the human desire to connect with the cosmic unknown. By forging this connection, Anderson ultimately suggests that our natural, earth-forged relics represent the sacred objects most worthy of enshrining.

Jessica Simmons-Reid (MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; BA, Brown University) is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles and Joshua Tree. She’s interested in the interstitial space between the language of abstraction and the abstraction of language, as well as the intermingling of poetry and politics. She has contributed essays and reviews to Carla and Artforum, among others.

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