Dailies

Having established a set of rules that contrasts sharply with the subject of the image, Demand would first notice something on the street that had the potential to turn into such a sketch and then find an application for the endless flow of photographs taken with his smartphone in the hope of “using them someday, somehow.” The Dailies are more varied in terms of composition. As the artist explains, they do not have the architectural significance of large-scale photographs: they are not “windows,” merely fixed views of various insignificant things shot mainly outdoors. The fact of leaving the studio and testing the method literally in the open air (and, we should add, in Californian light; Demand launched the series when he lived and worked in Los Angeles) makes the Dailies an air gap in many of Demand’s exhibitions. In this case, collected in a single space, they do not form a series that does not end in principle but increase the density of visual micro events, training the eye to register the seemingly imperceptible and secondary. They are partly reminiscent of the mechanics of social media, with its fixing of everyday impressions or micro-events, reducing or replacing text and even the word as a suitable instrument for describing reality.