Daniel Gibson: Manzanita

Nazarian / Curcio is pleased to present Manzanita, the gallery’s third solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Daniel Gibson. On view from September 12 through October 24, 2026, the exhibition will open with a reception on Saturday, September 12 from 6–8 PM.

Building on his longstanding engagement with drawing, memory, and the natural world, this suite of eleven oil pastel paintings on linen explores the landscape as a site of perception and invention. Gibson’s paintings move between observed and imagined environments, using automatic drawing as a means of accessing the subconscious and allowing forms and narratives to emerge intuitively. The resulting landscapes occupy a space between recollection and invention, collapsing distinctions between remembered places and futures yet to be lived.

The exhibition’s title references a plot of land Gibson owns along the Mexican border in San Diego County. Manzanita is also one of the thirteen tribal band names of the Kumeyaay, the Indigenous people who have migrated across this land, from the ocean to the desert, for more than 10,000 years. This history becomes a lens through which the landscape appears in Gibson’s paintings. Granite rocks recur throughout the works, referencing the morteros once used by the Kumeyaay to grind acorns, seeds, and nuts for meals. Rather than functioning as fixed representations of place, these elements connect deep time with Gibson’s own relationship to the land.

Across the exhibition, Gibson considers how artistic practice can become a way of making sense of change, inheritance, and the passage of time. His recent transition into fatherhood is present within this larger inquiry, bringing questions of continuity and responsibility into his engagement with the landscape. Fields of native flowers become imagined spaces of exploration, while the desert dove for which his daughter is named appears throughout the drawings. These figures do not simply illustrate a family narrative; they suggest a movement between generations, connecting personal experience to a larger sense of continuity.

The palette, a recurring motif throughout the exhibition, becomes another vehicle for this exploration. In Happy Destiny, it looms over the landscape; elsewhere, it shifts into the form of a head, a rock, or an object held aloft. Both tool and symbol, the palette becomes a meditation on the sustaining power of artistic practice. In Double Self Portrait, a figure raises the palette toward the sky in a gesture that recalls prayer. As Gibson has put it, “The palette saved me.” The statement gives the motif a broader significance: painting becomes a means of moving through uncertainty while remaining open to change.

The modest scale of the paintings reinforces their intimacy while allowing them to operate collectively as a larger visual narrative. Installed in a close sequence along the gallery wall, the eleven works unfold like pages of an accordion book. Sleepy Time Tea evokes the quiet rituals of childhood, while Everything and the Moon places the palette within an expansive imagined landscape. Together, the works construct a world in which personal experience meets a deeper history of place.

Ultimately, Manzanita extends Gibson’s longstanding use of imagination as a way of transforming the world around him. His landscapes do not retreat from history or uncertainty; they rework them into something newly possible. Memory becomes a source of invention, while painting becomes a means of opening the familiar to other ways of seeing. In Gibson’s hands, imagination is not an escape from the world, but a way of making a more expansive one.