Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack

I pick up where my battle leaves off. Ritualizing narratives whether it be an unrestful journey of an Afro Cowboy or love wounds of a Black Matador. My work is a universal vision for the people and embodies a magnitude of cultural legacies I have been influenced by or subconsciously tapped to produce. I use performance, sculpture and installation as peace offerings for the world that we are constantly tossed in to strengthen the ties of humanity. I’m bringing found objects to life sculpting them into multi-dimensionally functional entities or beings, commanding the readymade and constructing/deconstructing assemblages right before the naked eye. I’m using the brilliance of improv to empower the use of props within my practice. They are tools for communication that always seem to find another function. Sharing a direct link to the people and different natures of society, there’s a very strong bond in my work discussing fate, intuition and stereotypical identities that further a relationship with the audience. While engaged, I mirror worlds that i’ve been exposed to growing up. Out of my love and will for language material gets sourced from wherever it may lay. Drawing from personal memory is important. This gives truth to forms and the symbolism surrounding their existence. I look at found objects as spirits of the streets, preferably household objects or furniture because I want you to live and rest within the intimacy of the work. It is like food for the soul relating to an environment where I spend most of my time moving through in an overexposed fashion. We share a destination along with the contrast of past and future energies as if it were a duet. In time it becomes a responsibility to reverse the perception of their current state in the means of sacredness.

Performance empowers me to fluidly dive into the heritage of storytelling, improvising abstraction and controlling a clinic of dialogues. My body and mental health are being put on the line for the sake of one another. I’m trusting in the power of the ritual deed to keep me safe. Here is where I openly explore the functional characteristics and cultural identities of my work creating a spiraling installation. Ceremony and ritual confide in one another bending context and shifting the diaspora of space into a habitat for the unknown cultivating true value amongst public demand in proximity. Many references become present crossing the boundaries of the traditional between art. This charges the platform which highly engages the unknown embracing the limitless potential of language and immaterial. Speaking to the rawest forms of human emotion my mind acts as medium turning time into a spiritual doorway of the metaphysical and seamlessly balancing the poetic danger of art making while establishing a legacy of working fearlessly for the audience.

All of this comes from a real place. A place of honesty and the limitless. The spirituality in art making bridges the connection we need in order to prevail in time. In the purest way it synchronizes with my life’s actions and routines, giving me the confidence to further the ephemeral combined with the imagination and become subject to a continuing dialogue. I start to see a journey unmask itself right before my very own eyes, widening a path of universal practice and disciplines that take on greater risk than normal. Am I eternal or an eternalist?

These are questions that are raised which signify the longevity of art making in the most serious totality. Through DNA, ancestry and the fearlessness to dig deep inside myself, I choose to lift my voice high and push my abilities to a profound level, creating a rights to passage for all who choose to be guided.

There is an invincibility factor in my work before and after, I challenge this factor through physical and mental engagement with the sculpture and installation. The building and destruction and then re-building during different durations of my performance show and prove this invincibility does exist in real time. A form now becomes a testimony. Rather than the act of investigation, it is a passionate act of witnessing. This act of witnessing opens up the heart a bit more, balancing the material with a true sense of awareness and unique knowledge. Often I feel there are sacred entities passing through my work and a higher power connecting it to another bound source. This is what in some ways counter produced a body of work titled “Guardians Of The Afro Fantasy”.

Guardians Of The Afro Fantasy are universal protectors of the imagination constructed of immaterial experiences throughout the beautiful struggle and the labor of our will. They show me how ancient art making is, how fate has a way with creation. Each of them take on their own form of storytelling and performance using fragments driven from my memories and symbolic times compiled in the physical and spiritual appeal. A summoning takes place upon the mind. Functions of each Guardian become multi-dimensional and improvisational. The act of engagement with the Guardians reveals whispers of destruction along with durational effort and the light to rebuild. In space they represent a guild or order, erected towards the sky associated with time travel.

For me it is the stand against the enemy who holds high positions. Sharing similar nuances, the depiction of Black Masculinity is highly present, culturally decorated to the head wrapped in silk du-rags, stocking caps and other sourced symbolic head adornments. These are all golden odes to the male figures entering and exiting my life either in the dream state or real world. Activated by the connectivity of fantasy and reflection, Guardians Of The Afro Fantasy will strive as a continuum to protect the people’s legacy of the imagination.”