Artist's Statement

My recent watercolor paintings are inspired by a film editing technique called the cross dissolve, where a new image is slowly superimposed over a previous scene to indicate a transition in a movie. These dissolves were frequently used in the dramas of the 1950s to highlight scenes of psychological intensity.

With this motif in mind, I explore how a hyper-focus on individual self-growth has superseded more radical modes of social transformation since the middle of the 20th century. Some of my imagery is drawn from the Human Potential Movement of the 1970s, which connected the spiritual self-discovery of the 1960s to the reactive capitalism that would emerge in the decades that followed. Inspired by arguments made by filmmaker Adam Curtis and journalist Barabra Ehrenreich, my work explores how early wellness experiments often led to authoritarianism, gaslighting, and financial exploitation. Through fragmented, cut-and-paste compositions, I draw connections between the New Age excesses of the “Me generation” and our paranoid, volatile present.


Dan Schank (he/him) is an Associate Teaching Professor of Art and English at Penn State Behrend in Erie, PA. Schank received his BFA from Temple University's Tyler School of Art and his MFA from the University of California at San Diego. He is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work has been exhibited across the country in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Detroit, San Diego, Milwaukee, and New York. Schank has had solo exhibitions at Rebekah Templeton Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and the Erie Art Museum in Northwestern Pennsylvania. His work has been written about in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel, and the Erie Times News.