Heliopolis

In his series, Heliopolis, Leivick layers source material from satellite imagery, revealing a fictional terrain. Leivick’s aerial photo-collages are fundamental to his practice of focusing on human interaction with the environment, expressing his concern of the newly analytical visual discourse that has transformed our society at large.

These large-scale, constructed landscapes show the geography of the earth changed by the endeavors of civilization to the point where symbols and signs emerge and portray a mythical city, Heliopolis, that changes the nature of the visual conversation. Through his appropriations, Leivick highlights the shift in perspective from traditional photography towards a visual system in which machine vision and algorithmic sorting dominate the way that the world is perceived.

Heliopolis is titled after the “sun city”, to which the Phoenix of myth travels to his fiery death and is reborn from the ashes.

“It is the name of my efforts to conjure a desert city where the contrast of our age (annihilation and transcendence, determinism and agency, rationality, and madness) are called into question. It is a place where destruction and rebirth are one and the same, where the gap between reality and simulation is ever narrowing.” — Daniel Leivick

Leivick is originally from Santa Cruz, California and received his BA in Studio Art from Stanford University, and his MFA in Photography from Arizona State University. In 2014, Leivick was named a Brooks Fellowship recipient and attended a residency at Anderson Ranch. He was a 2013 Photolucida Critical Mass Finalist and has been exhibited at institutions such as the Art and Architecture Library at Stanford University; Sub Gallery in Stanford, CA; John Sommers Gallery in Albuquerque, NM; Northlight Gallery, Step Gallery, and Night Gallery in Tempe, AZ. Leivick is currently living in Los Angeles, California.