Cosentinoworks presents Meditations, a series of site-specific installations and studio-based reflections by Daniel Cosentino, a New Jersey-based multimedia artist, photographer, and educator. These conceptual works explore the relationship between place, memory, and material through land art, installation sculpture, and large format photography. Grounded in process-based approaches and darkroom traditions, the works operate as meditative investigations into presence, impermanence, and the unseen forces that shape experience. Featured projects such as Stairs to Nowhere, Totem Domum, Hammer, and Cedars of Lebanon were developed in liminal or transitional landscapes—sites marked by erosion, abandonment, or renewal. Created through interventions and captured with a large format camera, each work exists as both a sculptural act and a photographic document. These pieces encourage reflection on form and transience, bridging the languages of conceptual photography and environmental art.
Each of these works begins with an impulse. An idea or question that needs to take form. Some pieces unfold over time. Totem Domum developed slowly. I returned to the site many times, tested materials, considered how it might live as both an object and an offering. Gilding the tree was not about making it grand. It was about attention. About shifting the way we see something familiar and allowing it to carry new meaning without losing what it already was. It is also a point of transition between a property or a home, and the wilderness and public space beyond.
Hammer came together differently. That piece is made of adjustments and accumulations. The final photograph is not a document of the work, it is the work. It carries the thinking that led to it. It shows the refinements that shaped it. Sometimes these processes result in a sculpture that continues beyond the frame. Other times they stay within the image itself. Both are part of the way I understand making. As something that refines an idea rather than decorating it.
I work by bringing multiple contexts into the room. Architecture, language, theology, site. These aren’t references in the background, they are active elements. The works emerge from that collision of materials and thought. The studio is not a sealed space for planning. It is part of the same environment as the works that happen outdoors. Each piece is a response that sharpens over time. A search for resonance that can live in both object and image.
This group connects with other parts of my practice including the Hands Series, Standing Box, and Pieces of Me, Pieces of You. They don’t always share the same form but they come from the same attention to gesture, presence, and what memory leaves behind. Writing for Latent Views and Equine Magistrate gives shape to the thinking that moves alongside the physical work. All of it belongs to the same process. A way of paying attention that clarifies over time and often begins before I realize it has.
Stairs to Nowhere captures a moment of necessity and reflection. Built during the pandemic on my family homestead in Lincoln Park, NJ, the staircase, constructed from repurposed pallet wood, bridges the human and natural world as it descends into a forest ravine overlooking Great Piece Meadows. Functioning as both a pathway and a symbol of resilience, it holds traces of its origins—oxygen canisters used in medical facilities—and transforms them into a shared space of connection. The accompanying photograph, developed on-site using analog processes, documents this temporal and physical intersection of utility and memory.
Totem Domum originates from the remnant of a dead tree, prepared and gilded with gold. Positioned at the edge of a suburban property, the work serves as a "home totem," marking a place of passage and reflection. The gilding transforms the tree into a beacon that gestures toward the wilderness while remaining deeply tied to the personal and domestic. It is both a statement of discovery and a connection to the land, suggesting a narrative of renewal and the layered histories of place. Rooted in its specific location, the piece explores the intersection of the natural and human-made, creating a space to contemplate what is found and what is made meaningful.
Cedars of Lebanon is a photograph from the original homestead of Frederick Law Olmsted on Staten Island, NYC. I became observant of “cedars” in culture and their presence in literature, the humanities, and the arts. This led me to take pilgrimages, seeking specific sites of representation. I found these in relative obscurity, often hidden in plain sight. This work ties Olmsted’s connection to the earth and built environments to the idea of the latent image, where meanings buried within the land and its history emerge through observation and representation.
Hammer emerged during a formative period in my practice while I worked in my studio at the Hungerford Building along the train tracks in Rochester, NY. The studio was a place of intense growth and revisioning. In creating Hammer, I reflected on the act of making itself, investigating how materials, whether salvaged or fabricated, carry their own histories and narratives. This period challenged me to think about the studio not just as a workspace but as a dynamic site for connection—between myself and the objects I worked with, between the tools of labor and the ideas they could generate. Hammer represents this dialogue, a synthesis of exploration and intention, rooted in the tactile and conceptual possibilities of creation.
Brigita is a portrait of an artist on Cedar Hill, behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Central Park. The photograph captures both the individual and the place, yet it is removed from its immediate context, allowing it to exist outside of time. Cedar Hill, a natural landmark within the constructed environment of the park, becomes both a backdrop and a central element, holding latent connections to history and meaning.
