Artist of the Day, August 29, 2024: Gabriel Dawe, a Mexican textile artist (#2097)

 Originally from Mexico City, Gabriel Dawe creates site-specific installations that explore the connection between fashion and architecture, and how they relate to the human need for shelter in all its shapes and forms.

Dawe's work is centered in the exploration of textiles, aiming to examine the complicated construction of gender and identity in his native Mexico and attempting to subvert the notions of masculinity and machismo prevalent in the present day. His work has been exhibited in the US, Canada, Belgium, and the UK.

After living in Montreal, Canada for 7 years, he moved to Dallas, Texas, where he obtained his MFA at the University of Texas at Dallas. For the final two years of his degree, he was an artist in residence at CentralTrak, the Artist in Residency program at UTD. His work has been featured in numerous publications around the world, including Sculpture magazine, the cover of the 12th edition of Art Fundamentals published by McGraw-Hill, and in author Tristan Manco’s book Raw + Material = Art . He is represented by Conduit Gallery in Dallas, and by Lot 10 Gallery in Brussels.

Using high-quality and vibrantly colorful Gütermann thread, fastened to minimalist frames of powder-coated steel, Gabriel Dawe creates spectral, architectural site-specific installations. Dawe’s expanses of sensuous thread seek to alter the way we perceive and experience our bodies in space. In calling attention to common materials, he explores the possibilities and potential of everyday objects to become extraordinary. In his 2012 sculpture Plexus no. 20 (part of the series that Dawe presented at the renowned TED conference the same year), he stretched hundreds of individual threads into graded angles, overlapping elements to create complex interactions of gradient color. “A plexus is a network of vessels in the body and the network of threads is intended to relate to that [physicality],” Dawe explains.

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Gabriel Dawe