Presenting: The Art of Dan Talone
If you’re a frequent visitor to this blog, or to our Sideshow forums, you may already be quite familiar with Dan Talone(sethsabbat), whose gorgeous collections we’ve featured before, as well as a series of delightful guest posts during Le Carnaval Des Spectres. This time, we are thrilled to welcome him to Stranger Factory as an exhibiting artist, for our Sideshow exhibition opening in August.
Dan’s art is an atmospheric combination of Old World charm and rustic hand sewing, and his fabric sculpture is a delightful reflection of his eerie, off kilter, packratty, aesthetic.
He took some time away from his busy life in Paris to chat with us about his influences and collections!
Circus Posterus: How did you find your way to Paris? (You’re originally from America, right?)
Dan Talone: I actually left the states for London. My intention at the time was to take a little voyage before continuing my university education. Needless to say, I extended my visit for 5 years. Towards the end of that 5 years there were several events that took place that brought me to Paris. It was a good time for a new adventure. Now after 18 years here I am not sure I could make another move like that again.
How did you end up working with textiles, and what draws you to textile art?
I had a string of jobs that were back to back involving textile. It started off with wrapping a very old tree in silk in Florence, followed by the covering of furniture and found objects in Irish tweed in Kildare and then decorating a commercial center with 500 pairs of jeans in Belgium. I amassed a lot of fabric! I started to do little pieces of work and experiments, I never sewed before in my life, but was amazed at the pieces of handwork I would find in the brocantes (flea markets) here in Paris. My 3D stuff started with a combination of making creations based from my nephew’s drawings, and doing accessories for a song in a French piece of theater called Les Joyeux Bouchers by Boris Vian (The Happy Butchers) which called for slabs of meat, skinned rabbits and legs of ham all in fabric.