Damian Yanessa is a Sculptor and Installation Artist with a background in Ceramic Art and Design. His education consists of an MFA degree from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, and a BFA degree from Alfred University in addition to three years of Post-Bachelor Study Programs and a year of Studio Art at the American University, Washington DC. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania he has lived and worked in New York, Connecticut, Maine, Louisiana, and Michigan. Yanessa resides in the Northern Virginia / Washington DC metropolitan area where he maintained a private studio.

“My overall body of work deals with how technology is changing the way we think about our environment. In this regard, the first step in my approach has been to take into account the patterns that develop from an evolving sense of materiality--which is something I feel to be very prevalent today. As a result, a lot of the sculpture uses a variety of media to create patterns and progression that attempt to make some difficult to imagine constructs in our world a little more comprehensible…at least it does for me.

Moreover, I think that the work tries to provide a site for questioning or experience at that place where technology and environment overlap, because there are some pretty incredible effects that happen at that point. And primarily, that brings us into the context of how we think with our senses; how we collect knowledge with our senses. So the installation, for example, has gravitated to using light, translucency, and reflection in order to build an awareness, and a negotiation of our proximity to an artificial environment, that is at least in some part based on a natural environment.

Its that “Technosensual Comfort Zone” that we have in abundance in our lives these days that is pretty interesting, if for no other reason than the fact that it would not be comfortable for us if it were not familiar to us. So the environments that we have, and the abundance of lenses that we look through, trace this road of familiarity with material, and object, and composition, and image, so that our lives vacillate freely between the (natural) world we know, and the world we’ve created. I want my work to surface the effects of that.”

-taken from an interview in 2011