Daniel Gibson

Employing references to the natural world while speaking to hardships, resilience, and freedom, Daniel Gibson's paintings explore a lexicon of symbols that relate to his familial past and his identity as a Mexican-American. Growing up along the California border with Mexico, he witnessed the harsh realities of migration to America at an early age. In an effort to face the bleak nature of these grueling journeys, he turned to his imagination, reshaping reality with fantasy by introducing dreamlike guardians into the desert landscape. Conjuring people from his past as a means to examine the present, Gibson uses memories to create dream-like narratives that explore themes of identity and migration. Using the desert landscapes and seasides of Southern and Baja California as their fertile ground, his surrealistic scenes are populated with lush flora that take on an anthropomorphic quality. Butterflies, flowers, ocotillos, and desert mountains become proxies for the people navigating the desert, visualizing the narratives of migration without drawing on essentialist tropes. For the artist, his works are as much autobiographical as they are collective stories that document moments of struggle and celebration that would otherwise be lost to time.