Daniel Healey

Builds Skies from the Ground Up in tape ends

In tape ends, his second solo exhibition with SPY Projects, Los Angeles-based artist Daniel Healey invites viewers to look up, though not quite in the way they might expect. On view from June 20 through July 27, 2025, the show unveils a new body of work composed entirely of Scotch tape and fragments of printed advertisements, mostly drawn from home décor catalogues. Each piece is a patient, labor-intensive arrangement of color lifted, one sliver at a time, from images of skies, then reconstructed into abstract fields on canvas.

“It’s kind of funny thinking about why I chose skies,” Healey admits. “Why deconstruct a bunch of photographs of skies to make new skies out of them?” The question half rhetorical, half serious captures the heart of tape ends: a conceptual loop where destruction begets creation, and where images of the everyday are quietly transformed into something sublime.

At first glance, Healey’s new works appear fully abstract vibrating grids of blue and gray, organized into hazy, meditative compositions. But each mark is grounded in something real: commercial photographs of outdoor spaces, the kind used in catalogs to evoke calm or aspiration. “The blue, rather banal, skies had a rhythm I liked,” he says. “However abstract as they would look, they were based in forms of representational photographs.”

This delicate interplay between abstraction and representation is central to the work. For Healey, abstraction isn't about obscuring meaning, it’s about unlocking new layers of it. “The viewer starts without knowing where the representation lies,” he explains, “which opens up more possibilities for metaphor, internal reflection, spirituality, or empirical thoughts back to science and nature. Representation usually tells a more clear narrative. I tend to lean toward unknown territories.”

Working within self-imposed constraints: limited source material, a single-use tape rule, and no added pigment; Healey finds freedom in repetition. “Limitations were everything to me with this series,” he says. “I enjoyed being a bit boxed in. You have to rely somewhat on chance and what’s available, but also what you can control. It forced me to be resourceful. I found the repetition to be peaceful and self-reflective.”

That rhythm, equal parts intuitive and exacting, reveals itself across the surface of each piece, a texture built through thousands of individual actions. “There’s no imaginary high mountain top to get to,” Healey says. “Balancing inner trust and your own scrupulous mind, while allowing yourself to find some flow and enjoyment, that’s key.”

Many viewers, at first, mistake the works for varnished paintings or resin-soaked collage. But learning about the tape transfer process often shifts their perception. “I love when ordinary, common-place materials become transcended into something new that we can recognize as art,” Healey says. “I hope the work opens them up to new questions about material and process. When that happens, it becomes less about what it’s made from and more about what it evokes.”

tape ends runs June 20 through July 27, 2025, at SPY Projects in Los Angeles.
Opening reception: Friday, June 20, 6PM-9PM