A walk-through of Daniel Tankersley’s exhibit Unknown Unknowns, digital prints circa 2007 – 2020, on the second floor of the Hamersly Library gallery on the Western Oregon University campus in Monmouth is not enough.

Tankersley is a digital artist who teaches photography, video, animation and digital media in the university’s Art & Design and Film Studies programs. He takes digital images and alters them, using editing software, to manipulate the original subject, object, action; and in doing so also manipulates the viewer.

The interaction between viewer and photo is guided in Unknown Unknowns, which continues through Feb. 6. The experience begins with the title of the print and the information contained there. This is an intended part of the experience.

The installation deserves a more contemplative approach. A second viewing is required. Each look adds a new layer of context and understanding, and as a result viewers must reconsider how they see the world that surrounds them.

 “I have always been somebody who is, I think, at least fairly comfortable with ambiguity,” he said.

Tankersley came to art by a circuitous route. He got his start as a student at McMinnville High School. Growing up in a small town in the not quite yet extended Portland metro area, his interest was video production and by extension photography. He never really considered himself an artist.

“I got into photography, obviously, back then it wasn’t digital; I was always interested in light and what stuff looks like at a basic level, kind of visual,” he said. “I didn’t take art classes, but I took all the film and video classes. I worked at a video store, and I think cinematography has definitely been something that really trained me for that kind of balance and composition part of photography, watching a lot of movies and thinking about, what does the shot look like?

Sponsor

“The sort of simple harmony of proportions and balance. I don’t know why it feels important in photography to get that right, but I definitely feel it. If I’m compelled to take a picture, if I feel like, ‘oh, I want to take a picture of this,’ I have to move around and figure out what do the edges look like, what’s overlapping, what shouldn’t be overlap and move to get it, and then, if I get that right, that feels good; it just feels good to take that picture at that point. You may have a concept behind it or a story, those things are also super important, right? And then there’s that final piece. What does that look like, exactly ,and then getting it.”

From Mac High Tankersley attended Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., a suburban area of Los Angeles County, where he earned a bachelor’s degree.

“In undergraduate, I was a media studies major, so I read a lot of media theory, and I made a lot of electronic music. That was the studio component of my media studies, which was an interdisciplinary degree.”

After graduation he returned to Oregon, living in Portland with his partner while bouncing from odd job to odd job. Having no real ties to any sort of employment, when his partner decided to go to grad school in Florida he was up for the adventure.

He bounced from job to job while in both Portland and Florida. Two of these directly influenced his decision to study art. One of his jobs was selling imported jewelry on eBay. The other was in a print shop.

“That experience was actually super,” he said. “It was training for me to get really efficient at working with a computer, to move information around and manipulate things in a way that I’d never done before. As I had to get really fast at it and that was extremely valuable for them. Pivoting to making visual art with computers, which was something that I started doing in my spare time, something fun.

“I remember making, like, a complicated Excel spreadsheet with an array of repeating character values that I then used, like a PHP script (web development language) to morph that into an animation. It was live animation happening. It was interesting to me, manipulating information to make something visually interesting.”

Sponsor

The next step in his evolution as an artist came in the print shop, where he discovered tangible art as opposed to digital art.

“I found this job, working full time at a copy store right across the street from the University of Florida, which is a huge school so it’s pretty high-volume print production. I didn’t know much about how that worked, but I started working there and learned a little bit about using graphic design software and started being the color printer operator.

“Working in that environment got me off the screen. All my work before that in digital art had been like for a website, or a video that you could watch on screen. But then I was like, there’s a lot of interesting things you can do with this physical object of printing stuff. I got really into printing,” he said.

Encouraged by his family and partner, he applied to grad school and was accepted based on the digital and printed art he had created.  

During breaks and holidays Tankersley and his partner traveled home to Oregon and then returned to Florida, and each time they took a different route. He took photos each time and ended up with thousands of pictures. These trips were formative for him as an artist. He began to question his place in the world, and the world itself.

“We drove across the country and camped at national parks,” he said. “We would drive into parks in the middle of the night and wake up and discover where we were, and it was amazing.

“On those drives at that point in time, it was a moment where it was very clear that the main part of every single town was done, and the ring around outside with the big box stores was where everybody was. The downtowns were still standing, but vacant in more places than not. 

Sponsor

“It got me really thinking a lot about the political project of migrations in this country and the way that cities and towns are organized and the economic history. There are certain parts of it, the commercialism part and its connection to Main Street, and I had a lot of reading and listening to do to learn more about that and to make sense of what I was seeing in those communities.

“What does that mean to be born to parents who migrated from California to Oregon? What does it mean to be … that kind of migrant, a white American? Each generation moving many times either because they were in the military or to find work, or for all kinds of reasons. What is my place in this world of all this land that I was vaguely aware had been occupied, lived in by other people, by Native people, for a very long time before any white people moved here?” Tankersley said.

“Then kind of coming to terms with, encountering, knowledge about the history of the country that was a lot more complicated and violent and problematic than I realized as a kid.”

The art reflects this search for understanding the dynamics of life within the context of cities and locales throughout the country. He saw recurring motifs and communal archetypes across communities, such as the abandonment, decay and loss left behind as technology advances and grows. Much of his art is structural and representative. It is a mirror of those who occupy these cities in a collective sense.

“I was transient in some ways,” he said, “moving around a lot during the summer or winter breaks or when school was out. There was a certain amount of feeling a little bit detached because I wasn’t staying anywhere for very long. 

“We would stop and get something to eat and then we had another four hours to drive, but you can learn a lot in 45 minutes in a community. I don’t want to say that that is really representative of the true nature or experience of that community, but you can get a sense.”

He also began to explore the communal and individual experience of an environment, particularly a place or a setting. How is one’s experience different than that of someone else’s? His images hold a certain wistfulness and yet create a sense of ambiguity. The opacity of experience is thin and revealing while also being slightly disassociating. The dichotomy appears to appeal to Tankersley.

Sponsor

“I was thinking a lot about travel experiences in photography,” he said. “You go to a national park and everybody’s taking the same picture from the same spot, but it’s their version of it, right? 

“There’s the souvenir aspect of the picture to remind you of the experience, which is important, because we can’t access memories just at will. You have to have something that associates you to it, that leads you there so you can have that memory. Pictures are really perfect for that, but the fact that you could look up that same picture online and see a million versions of the same thing, but this one’s yours, right? 

“So, it’s not photography about necessarily having that picture. That picture is already available, but it’s about performing, being there, not like a performance for an audience, but visual.”   

“Different inputs, there’s that kind of like either-or tension between that dual nature of shared experience,” Tankersley continued. “Yes, it’s something we have in common. We both came to this place and looked at this view and took a picture of it and that’s something we have in common. But on the other hand, no, we’re not the same person, and we didn’t have the same feelings about that spot, and we weren’t there at the same time of day or time of year or weather, or whatever. It’s impossible to say whether it’s the same picture or not; it’s totally different. It’s kind of both, right?” 

Tankersley’s exhibit is the culmination of his work from that program several years ago. This senior thesis shows Tankersley’s potential, which he continues to fulfill. 

He now shares that enthusiasm with his students at Western Oregon University. One of his crowning achievements has been working the past few years to create the student-only gallery. While he channels most of his time into teaching, he continues to produce thoughtful, explorative work which can be seen on his website, dantank.com.

***

Sponsor

“Unknown Unknowns” can be seen through Feb. 6 at Hamersly Library, on the Western Oregon University campus, 525 Monmouth Ave. N., Monmouth, OR 97361. Library hours are 8 a.m.-midnight Mondays-Wednesdays, 8 a.m.-9 p.m. Thursdays, 8 a.m.-6 p.m. Fridays, and 2 p.m.-midnight Sundays.