“Daniel Wheeler's art has always been distinguished by the meticulous crafting of his chosen materials in the service of a globalized vision of how people and objects are related in the world. He combines a peculiar capability for integrating found and fabricated objects into new syntheses and harnesses that capability to the desire to develop works in sequence that reveal complex subterranean narratives. Enigmatic and beautiful, Wheeler's individual objects allude to a world of jerry-rigged bridges linking each of us to an understanding of the world around us; as a collective entity, his work fashions its poetic drive from our repeated attempts to make of those bridges a coherent whole. His ongoing investigations of art and object function as a kind of freeform cultural archeology where the viewer is both invited to be thoughtful about what objects mean to us and enchanted at how they look to us.”

- John O’Brien, Los Angeles

“The work is political, but it is also poetic; its focus is tight, but the work is emphatically open. Refusing to paint the world in black and white, Wheeler cleaves to the gray area, where the romance of the unknown and the will to power are acknowledged – not merely the brutal consequences incurred thereof. This makes for art that is difficult to assimilate, that is both troubling – and urgent.”

- Susan Kandel, LA Times

“Daniel Wheeler’s interactive, almost architectural pieces politicize spatial relations, engaging the visitor with their tightly conceived, beautifully crafted forms….Wheeler’s mode of sculptural storytelling gently interpolates rather than harasses, beckons and entertains rather than coerces the spectator. Through an open-ended narrativity that allows for and even solicits the expression of the visitor’s own desires, his work plays out the impossibility of exploring the new without simultaneously destroying it.”

- Amelia Jones, Artforum

On You Are Here:

You Are Here, Daniel Wheeler’s ambitious installation, knocked’em dead in it’s debut down at Cal State Fullerton in 1995, but who among us saw it then? Now, however, you don’t have to drive nearly to Disneyland to see this lucid and intense spacework. You Are Here is an exploration of individual perception, but it has a political twist to it that rings even more true in the Ashcroft era than it did in the Reno. In fact, the installation passes us through stages of experience, each one more and more socially and personally loaded…. When Wheeler created You are Here, reality TV was just a gleam in some monster’s eye. Talk about foresight!”

Peter Frank
LA Weekly

”Paradoxically [in You are Here], one is simultaneously absent and omnipresent. And, like the body, this installation can never be viewed in it’s entirety at any one time. Instead it must be interpreted and mentally assembled as the sum of its parts….

As this work requires – at the very least- some form of viewer participation, it ultimately makes one aware that YOU ARE HERE, although Wheeler does not make any attempt to provide the inevitably impossible “how” and “why.” Instead his work addresses the means by which human nature ascribes meaning to objects, places and architecture in establishing ontological assuredness.”

Tommy Freeman
Artweek