ARTFORUM: The Artist’s Artist: Twenty-six artists reflect on 2022
To take stock of the past year, Artforum asked an international group of artists to select a single exhibition or event that most memorably caught their attention in 2022…
JEFFREY VALLANCE: Daniel Hawkins (Mojave Desert, California)
Daniel Hawkins has raised a fully operational lighthouse in the windswept desert near Hinkley, California. Yet his Desert Lighthouse, 2017–, has been renamed “Stargate Hinkley” by an apocalyptic group who believe it’s an intergalactic portal. Others claim it’s a beacon for UFOs. Some assert that climate change will raise the sea level up to the ground the building stands on, creating a new shoreline. An adjoining makeshift graveyard is strewn in ashes and plastic flowers. Hinkley remains a ghost town since the San Francisco–based Pacific Gas and Electric Company dumped the carcinogen hexavalent chromium into its groundwater. In 1996, with the help of Erin Brockovich, PG&E was ordered to pay $333 million in damages to the town’s residents—at that time, the largest settlement for a direct-action lawsuit in US history.
GIULIO EINAUDI: Where Light In Darkness Lies: The Story of the Lighthouse
Desert Lighthouse is featured as the cover of the Italian-edition of Veronica Della Dora's book "Where Light In Darkness Lies: The Story of the Lighthouse," published by Giulio Einaudi. In both the Italian and English editions of the book, the epilogue chapter is dedicated to the Desert Lighthouse and its unexpected role as a memorial for visitors and nearby locals.
“An illuminating history of both real-life lighthouses and the beacons of literature and art alike, shedding light on the multifaceted power of these liminal structures…”
Link: Italian Edition
Link: English Edition
ARTILLERY MAGAZINE: Let There Be Light: Daniel Hawkins’ Desert Lighthouse Turns Five
By Doug Harvey
“It looks like the unlicensed pot farms have ceased operations.” Daniel Hawkins is surveying the Mojave Desert landscape surrounding the hill on which he built a fully functioning 50-foot solar-powered lighthouse in 2017. Below us, an elaborate compound of white tents has begun to disintegrate. “There’s another over that hill, but it’s gone too. Maybe the sheriff came by.”
ARTSY: 10 L.A. Artists Whose Work You Probably Don’t Know—but Should
By Doug Harvey
Last year some friends and I made a list of Los Angeles artists who were overdue for local museum acknowledgment—project rooms, mid-career surveys, retrospectives, whatever—and had to quit when we reached 100. It just stopped being fun. For all the talk of L.A. as an international art destination, it still has a doozy of an inferiority complex. East coast and international art stars—and a handful of Angelenos that fit the mold—are afforded the bulk of face time, at the expense of the gazillion graduates pouring out of the dozen local graduate programs every year; the idiosyncratic veterans who didn’t fit into the Ferus Gallery agenda; and the off-the-charts originals who blossomed in the lack of limelight.
LA TIMES: Datebook: A lighthouse in the desert, sculptures that defy gravity, ‘Snow White’ as emblem of excess
By Carolina A. Miranda
Daniel Hawkins, “Desert Lighthouse.” The Los Angeles-based artist is obsessed with producing works that toy with ideas of grandiosity, failure and gestures that border on the Sisyphean. (One of his goals as an artist is to ultimately build a scale replica of the Hoover Dam.) Now, Hawkins has installed a 50-foot tall, fully functioning lighthouse in the Mojave Desert in the vicinity of Barstow. The piece even features a light to guide travelers through this rugged landscape. Directions and coordinates can be found on the website. On long-term view, Hinkley, Calif., desertlighthouse.org.
VICE: Meet the Artist Building a Lighthouse in the Desert
By Tanja M. Laden
At first, the thought of a lighthouse in the desert seems like a ridiculous idea. Lighthouses are meant to both guide and warn ships and boats, providing a point of reference in dark and/or stormy weather. As such, the structures themselves have become emblematic of large bodies of water. The desert, by contrast and definition, is a dry, desolate swath of barren land. But if you've ever driven across the vast expanse of a desert yourself (especially at night), you might know how unsettling it is to not have even a tiny glowing beacon to help guide you. In this sense, a lighthouse would serve the same function as it does by the lake, sea, or ocean. It was this realization that first compelled multimedia artist Daniel Hawkins to embark on the ambitious endeavor of building his own lighthouse in California's Mojave Desert. In fact, he already built one, but it was dismantled by scavengers. Now he's doing it again.
LA WEEKLY: Snips and Snails: let the Fall Art Season Begin!
By Doug Harvey
As for L.A.’s shaky future, Saturday also features openings at two of the new model of artist-run collectives. Charles Irvin — most recently featured in the Hammer’s “9 Lives” weirdness buffet — is kick-starting his Chinatown commune WPA with a solo show titled “Four Baboons Adoring the Rising Sun,” opening Saturday, from 7 to 10 p.m. Back out West, at Godawfulist, artist Steven Hull’s newly hatched Las Cienegas Projects, emerging artist Nikki Pressley is sharing the space with up-and-comer Daniel Hawkins, a recent UCLA undergrad who has been producing some of the most interesting painting/sculpture/performance/engineering hybrids. His new piece is a sort of fun house diorama of an infinite stretch of railroad tracks, with the bells and whistles exposed. The great technological agent of manifest destiny collapsed into an obvious fiction.