Daniel Hawkins (b. 1987, Colorado Springs, Colorado)

Frequently combining the deliberate undertaking of Sisyphean tasks (building an actual size replica of the Hoover Dam) with explorations of the aesthetics of plausible deniability (infiltrating a reality television show about bizarre food addictions), Hawkins’ oeuvre explores cycles of grandiosity, failure, and rationalization through a battery of sculptural, architectural, land art, and performative strategies, while incorporating diverse media from printmaking, drawing, and painting, to video, sound art, and digital imaging.

In 2017, Hawkins built the Desert Lighthouse – a fully-functioning lighthouse in the Mojave Desert. Hawkins’ Desert Lighthouse project has been supported in part by the Center for Land Use Interpretation, West of Rome Public Art, as well as the Center for Cultural Innovation, and was the subject of a mini-documentary produced by Discovery Channel Canada. A separate forthcoming media collaboration examines three of Hawkins’ larger undertakings, including his attempt to mount a climbing expedition with the goal of summiting a topographically flat mountain, his on-going effort to re-construct the Hoover Dam at a one-to-one scale in piecemeal fragments, and the construction of Desert Lighthouse, on the outskits of Hinkley, California – the site of PG&E’s infamous Hexavalent Chromium spill.

As critic Doug Harvey observes, “Drawing equally from the legacies of land artists like Robert Smithson and storytellers such as filmmaker Werner Herzog, Hawkins’ Desert Lighthouse project illuminates a constantly shifting landscape of post-modern narratives, hearkening back to the Neolithic monument builders at the dawn of human history while looking forward to the internet’s transformative impact on the nature of human consciousness and reality.”

Hawkins studied art at UCLA, Yale’s Norfolk Summer School of Art, and UC Irvine, and has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at: UC Riverside’s Barbara and Art Culver Center for the Arts, PRJCT LA, CMay Gallery, Las Cienegas Projects, UC Irvine’s Contemporary Arts Center, and more.

He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.