Night Gallery presents YOU CAN HATE ME NOW, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles–based artist Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack. Expanding an interdisciplinary practice that merges assemblage, printmaking, performance, and installation, the exhibition channels prophetic energy and conceptual precision to explore critical action, divinity, and survival in the modern era. Several years in development, it marks Gaitor-Lomack’s second solo presentation with the gallery and seventh overall, a number that signals culmination and transition within his evolving trajectory.

Through work that holds ancestral memory and contemporary social critique in productive tension, Gaitor-Lomack's practice challenges established hierarchies and institutional frameworks. Drawing on Fred Moten's concept of "fugitive planning and Black study," his art functions as both communion and inquiry within a language of rebellion, faith, and perseverance. His installations incorporate unconventional materials such as ice pops, dodgeballs, toilet paper, stone, wood, and soil. Like the Arte Povera artists, Gaitor-Lomack finds significance in humble materials, creating work where spiritual concerns meet architectural form.

YOU CAN HATE ME NOW includes a new work from Gaitor-Lomack's ongoing series Guardians of the Afro Fantasy which illuminates centuries of presence through found materials reimagined as vessels of memory and mythology. These fragments of the everyday acquire the gravity of classical form, evoking Greek and Roman deities while affirming Black divinity and power. Much like a previous sculpture channeling Michelangelo’s Moses, Brown Sugar Fortuna (Guardians of the Afro Fantasy), references Fortuna, the Roman goddess of fate. Influenced by Carl Orff’s "Carmina Burana", the piece channels choral intensity and the cyclical meditation of fortune’s wheel, turning unpredictability into structure. Guided by Elena Filipovic’s writing on exhibitions as temporal forms, it unfolds as a living score, a choreography of matter and chance that resists closure. By invoking Fortuna, Gaitor-Lomack reframes uncertainty as creative force. Found materials marked by labor and loss transform into symbols of potential. Here, fortune operates not as luck but as collaboration, a redistribution of power through the act of making. 

Growing up in Neptune, New Jersey—a coastal town named for the Roman god of the sea—Gaitor-Lomack developed an early relationship with the Atlantic Ocean that continues to inform his sensibility. The water offered what he describes as an education in perception, teaching him to understand art as something in motion rather than static. The ocean's particular quality of being simultaneously vast and intimate remains central to his practice.

The influence of the ocean carries into Los Angeles, where Gaitor-Lomack has lived and worked for over 12 years. The city's rhythms and contradictions filter into his recent body of work: fire truck sirens punctuate afternoon tea ceremonies, the scent of dried flowers mixes with urban exhaust, children play against the San Gabriel Mountains, and street vendors call out their wares. Meanwhile, ICE raids loom, and the hum of addiction drifts through it all. Displacement abuts resilience, transposing Los Angeles' complexities into compositions that insist on visibility and care.

Pope Dealer, a large photographic intervention captures the austere beauty of a landmark, accompanied by Baby Boomer and Bag Full of Tricks, which deepen the meditation on generational transition. In Baby Boomer, a reclaimed bassinet cradles a bed of charcoal, while a dark glass vessel filled with water nestles within its carriage. A white sheet spills from its mouth. The convergence of these materials ignites an allusion to a Molotov cocktail—a weapon of dissent, a harbinger of unrest. Here, the artist reflects on the promises and failures of the generation before his own, and the uneasy inheritance left in its wake. Bag Full of Tricks pairs a 1930s Monte Carlo travel poster by Jean Gabriel Domergue (1889–1962), with a plug-in magic-wand vibrator sealed in a black plastic trash bag, merging opulence and illusion. Across these compositions, sentiment yields to persistence, and dignity emerges from the friction between limitation and invention.

Gaitor-Lomack's bi-coastal formation bridges New York and Los Angeles, two poles of American modernity. From New York’s legacy of Conceptualism, Hip-Hop, fashion and theater, he weaves the dramatic natures and concrete realities. From Los Angeles’s assemblage and spiritual traditions shaped by Senga Nengudi, Noah Purifoy, David Hammons, and John Outterbridge, he inherits humor, material insight, and poetics of seeing. Between these influences, he forges a visual language that moves between protest and prophecy. For him, the true value is being from it to process it and share it. The foundation of 1990s Black street culture, with its codes and improvisation, continues to guide his consciousness. The street, both altar and academy, taught invention as survival. The music of Nas, Tupac Shakur, and Wu-Tang Clan revealed lyrics as philosophy. Yet Gaitor-Lomack’s ear extends beyond genre. With what he calls a “universal ear and heart,” he listens across gospel, jazz, blues, hip-hop, punk, opera, soul, soft rock, and alternative. This sensitivity to tone shapes the cadence of his sculptures, where harmony becomes structure and vibration. Music is not backdrop but architecture, determining how his works breathe and hold time. Lyrics become affirmations and often instruct methods of art making. 

Gaitor-Lomack engages with the class tensions articulated by Margo Jefferson in Negroland, where refinement operates as both inheritance and burden. His work provokes the self-conscious performance of status within the art world, revealing how aspiration can obscure authenticity. YOU CAN HATE ME NOW acts as mirror and disruption, exposing contradictions within cultural power. Yet his critique is not bitterness; it is clarity. The exhibition replaces spectacle with sincerity, proposing values grounded in privacy, discipline, and conviction. He embellishes what he calls the “old cool,” a return to privacy and discretion when small circles of excellence inspired one another through exchange rather than competition. Against the velocity of today’s desperate market, he cultivates his own timing where art and truth meets in the palms of his hands, instead of juggling inauthentic ambitions. This approach values intimacy over exposure and dialogue over popularity.

In Dodge The System, 4EVER, Gaitor-Lomack merges protest and printmaking into a continuum of expression, reflecting Dr. Keli Jones’s notion of ritual as resistance, where endurance turns into insight. His engagement with modern censorship extends this defiance, invoking Édouard Glissant’s “right to opacity” to reject simplification. Film, sport, and lyric function as metaphors for composition and transcendence. The montage poetics of Arthur Jafa, the dreamscapes of Federico Fellini, and the essayistic vision of Chris Marker intersect with the athletic grace of Serena Williams and the compositional clarity of Jay-Z, forming a lexicon of confidence and recording as living manifestation.

Gaitor-Lomack's mark-making becomes sculptural, his objects linguistic, his installations choral. Guardians of the Afro Fantasy becomes a cosmology of labor and imagination. Within it resides what Elizabeth Alexander calls The Black Interior, a psychic refuge where unseen histories vibrate through material and imagination bears witness. In this spirit of reclamation, Gaitor-Lomack reflects on Tina Turner, who left the United States for Switzerland in an act of self-liberation. Her journey was not retreat but rebirth, a refusal of exploitation and a claim to sovereignty. Her migration parallels his own ethos: freedom as devotion, exile as expansion, preservation as art.

Gaitor-Lomack’s practice effortlessly aligns with the visionary daring of the self-taught, those who create from necessity and instinct rather than convention. He shares kinship with Tadao Ando, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Thornton Dial, figures who translated lived experience into architecture, language, and liberation. Each moved within a cultural code of memory and survival, turning instinct into legacy. Within this lineage, Gaitor-Lomack defines authorship as courage—the act of making without permission.

In Only Way Up, Gaitor-Lomack transforms a turn-of-the-century gold birdcage elevator, salvaged from a historic hotel, into a sculptural stage activated by the durational presence of the body on opening night. The piece embodies a decade of what Gaitor-Lomack calls “Conceptual Performance Assemblage,” a method uniting sculpture, ceremony, and the metaphysical. Nearby, Triple Beam Dreams reimagines a child’s red, blue, and yellow bunk bed layered with mesh and triple beam scales, oscillating between innocence and survival. Its title borrows from street vernacular for a drug dealer's ambition, and together these works reveal the economic and spiritual networks shaping the artist’s community.

Gaitor-Lomack’s work resonates with Homi K. Bhabha’s “Third Space,” Glissant’s relational poetics, and the Wabi-Sabi devotion to impermanence. Craftsmanship recalls Martin Puryear’s precision, the ancestral soul of Betye Saar, and Roberta Smith’s “intelligence of form.” Through living within risk and awareness, Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack stands as a contemporary shaman, translating instability into enlightenment. His practice redefines engagement as presence rather than possession. This challenges inherited systems of patronage and collecting, proposing instead a participatory ethos in which audiences engage not as owners but as witnesses to art’s continuous unfolding. 

This exhibition is dedicated to the wonderful people who have supported me through thick and thin, to my family and friends and to the beloved city of Los Angeles. Thank you.

- Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack

Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack (b. 1988, Neptune, NJ) has presented solo exhibitions at Jac Forbes Contemporary, Los Angeles; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; 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; The Warehouse, Dallas, TX; and Outono Projects, Los Angeles, among others. Gaitor-Lomack's work is in the permanent collections of The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; and The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA. He 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 Wrapbook,  the Los Angeles Times, Autre Magazine, and Art Industry News.