The process of painting a landscape is inherently one of framing. The artist controls what is included in the scene, but what is excluded often says just as much. In my work, I employ structures of spatial control, such as frames, walls, hedges, and moats, in a paradoxical mode. Although the spaces within the paintings are spare and starkly geometric in form, they do not present themselves as places that can be entered, claimed, or fully comprehended. Flat planes seem to warp and recede, and nonsensical structures create confusion between inside and outside, natural and manmade.

 My practice is defined by an intuitive approach to painting. I use this medium as a channel to reflect on the phenomenological experiences of sight and hearing. Through abstraction I investigate how we access and interact with our immediate environment using these sensory receptors. Themes of perception, cognition, expression, and translation emerge in my work, introducing the human condition. I draw inspiration from elements that embody the notion of interference—such as camouflage, signal waves, meshes, grids, and stencils—to suggest the conscious and unconscious human filter.

 My work delves into the intersections of myth, religion, and personal narrative by using archetypal symbols to navigate these connections. The paintings blur the boundaries between abstraction and figuration, allowing forms to emerge intuitively and giving space for ideas of identity and storytelling to unfold naturally. I am drawn to themes like the interplay between the sacred and the profane, the playful and the serious, and the mythic and the real.

 I work between painting, sculpture, and poetry, incorporating found material from my immediate surroundings to depict the landscape through the social, political, and economic systems that produce it. Gravitating toward sites of transition, I form deep relationships through observation and time spent writing. To prioritize the material realities of these sites, I incorporate poetic gestures of care, such as sewing, collaging, and gestural abstraction, into my process. The resulting work embodies landscapes as sites of hidden labor, political upheaval, and environmental disruption.

 By using painting as a tool for self-exploration, play, and storytelling, my work is often rooted in figurative imagery and explores themes that are central to my identity. I find inspiration from my Danish and Filipino heritage as well as from the mundane aspects of daily life and long gone memories.

As a painter, my intention is to stimulate moments of introspection that resonate across cultures and embrace the human condition within an increasingly globalized world, posing the question, What does it truly mean to be human in today’s society?

 I am a representational painter whose works focus on landscape, interior, and figures in urban settings that are often disregarded. I am interested in the tension between illusional space resulting from chiaroscuro and perspective and the pictorial space, including composition and the materiality of the surface. My paintings typically feature the interaction between architectural or industrial structures and geometrical shapes of the jointed physical panels.

 My paintings draw from personal memories, migration, and the universal experience of disconnection to explore the profound emotions of longing, absence, and solitude. Through dreamlike landscapes and evocative interior spaces, I aim to capture the tension between presence and void, inviting viewers to reflect on the weight of what is lost or unseen.

 Dannah Mari Hidalgo creates figurative paintings highlighting tension and intimacy against the backdrop of family dynamics. Born in Hawaii to Filipino immigrant parents, Hidalgo draws influence from her relations and utilizes double imaging and painterly techniques. In her work the concept of the double image reinforces dichotomous relationships between the abstract and representational; the severe and humorous; the depth and flatness; and the tension and resolution.

 A word’s meaning can shift or be lost the more you say it. An object’s purpose can start to wane the longer you stare at it. My paintings are the result of mulling over familiar sources, layered with ephemeral phenomena to elevate and transform them from their original states.

 If naming something is the first step of dealing with what is not yet known, then I am interested in the inverse. In my work I explore what is possible when what is familiar becomes something other than what is initially expected. By recontextualizing imagery pulled from my surroundings via collage and painting, I play with relationships between image and object and familiarity and strangeness to subvert assumption and prompt surprise.