BIOGRAPHY
DANIEL FLAHIFF (b. 1966 in Los Angeles, CA) is a New York based multidisciplinary artist. He studied at the UCLA Writer’s Studio, the School of Visual Concepts, Seattle/Florence, Italy, Pacific Lutheran University, and the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, CA, earning his MFA in 1997.
He was a 2026 Moshava Art studio resident, an Official Selection at the Telluride International Experimental Cinema Exposition, and was awarded an Emerging Voices Grant by the Puget Sound Group of Northwest Painters.
Flahiff has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the LA Times Theater, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA; Freespace Gallery, Seattle, WA; and the School of Visual Concepts Gallery, Seattle, WA.
His work has been included in group exhibitions at at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Australia; Röda Sten, Göteborg, Sweden; Botkyrka Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden; FRAME, Copenhagen, Denmark; The Pilot Space, Auckland, New Zealand; Glowlab, Brooklyn, NY; Three Day Weekend, Los Angeles; and the Bellevue Arts Museum, Bellevue, WA.
Flahiff’s work is held in private collections in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Phoenix, Seattle, Munich, and London.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
L'hérédité n'est pas ce qui passe par la fêlure, elle est la fêlure elle-même : la cassure ou le trou, imperceptibles.
Heredity is not what passes through the crack, it is the crack itself: the break, the hole, imperceptible.
— Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens (1969)
I build with material that already carries a past: used clothing, yard sale tools, discarded furniture, stolen moments, lost time. Collecting, disassembling, rearranging, and rebuilding this material isn't a metaphor, it's the complete form and content of the work. Scratches, cracks, cuts, jump cuts, and missed focus stay legible as evidence, traces of a life that once existed outside the piece.
My practice is rooted in a West Coast, blue-collar identity: seven schools by the seventh grade, a preacher's-kid childhood, a fiercely loyal small-town crew, sons of military men and shipyard workers. That world is filtered through classical training in drawing and painting, direct mentorship from Mike Kelley, Stephen Prina, and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, and twenty years as a commercial designer, three lenses that taught me nothing arrives neutral.
The result isn't a resolved object, it's an open one, caught between what the material was, what I've done to it, and what it could become. Memory, identity, and history aren't subjects I illustrate. They're the literal content and structure of the work.
— Daniel Flahiff