Night Gallery is proud to present The Many Spirit Don; Opera di Dio, a solo exhibition by Daniel Tyree Gaitor-Lomack. This is the artist’s first solo presentation at the gallery, following a 2020 performance at Night Gallery and participation in the group exhibitions Grey Garden and MAJEURE FORCE. 

In The Many Spirit Don; Opera di Dio, Gaitor-Lomack leverages found materials and abstract gestures to give rise to new activations of memory, possibility, and personal connection. The works in the exhibition were conceived in various European and North American cities, a multifacetedness that illustrates Gaitor-Lomack’s creative independence and omnipresence as an artist. The show’s title, in part, gestures toward the histories imbued in any given object, elevating its status to that of a holy relic. A self-described polymath, Gaitor-Lomack himself is the “Don,” who channels his ability to work in a wide range of modes into compelling sculptures and paintings. 

Not unlike spirituality, there are many roads that lead to Gaitor-Lomack’s work; a thoughtful balance between improvisation and consideration allows for each work to be both autobiographical and broadly germane. Just as our relationship with the divine—that which is placed under the umbrella of “having faith” for some, and invokes religious devotion for others—may shift with time, Gaitor-Lomack conceives of his practice as a fluid response to internal and external phenomena. The artist’s found materials, inscribed with cultural connotations and markers of their own pasts, are altered to enter a new phase of existence. In this sense, the works on view are objects of rebirth, arising from myriad forms of sacred guidance and lived experience. 

Judeo-Christian symbolism appears throughout the exhibition. Mozey Whoazy (Guardians of the Afro Fantasy), 2018, a sculpture with a mop as a head, stands with arms outstretched. The fabric swathed over the figure is reminiscent of church choir regalia, creating a prophetic aura. Elsewhere, icy pops are incorporated into assemblages Gaitor-Lomack refers to as “charged bricolage:” a wall frieze depicting the Last Supper is overlaid with tubes of unfrozen popsicles, partially obscuring the iconic image with horizontal lines of artificial color. Wooden crosses have been given a similar treatment, and the passing of late afternoon light through the melted juice has the effect of stained glass. The found iconography that permeates this body of work seems to come to the artist at the right moments—less through divine intervention than through an openness to chance and a reverence for serendipity. Time itself becomes a medium. 

Gaitor-Lomack understands himself as a conduit for the work’s becoming. Though bound to time and place, the pieces constantly evade dogma or rigid categorization. We may approach this exhibition as a dialectic of continuous actions, wherein artist and artwork similarly evolve with the world around them. The Many Spirit Don; Opera di Dio attests to the generative capacities of art, and the presence of everything in everything else. 

Daniel Tyree Gaitor-Lomack (b. 1988, Neptune, NJ) has presented solo exhibitions at Lyles & King, New York; Alyssa Davis Gallery, New York; and Maple St. Construct, Omaha. His work has been featured in recent group shows at Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Public Gallery, London; James Cohan Gallery, New York; Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles; Welancora Gallery, Brooklyn; HVW8 Art + Design Gallery, Los Angeles; PPOW Gallery, New York; and Outono Projects, Los Angeles, among others. Gaitor-Lomack is the recipient of the NXTHVN Studio Fellowship and a Rema Hort Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. His work and performances have been written about in publications including Artforum, Hyperallergic, Artillery, the Los Angeles Times, Autre Magazine, and Art Industry News.