Daeton Abalos Oclaray is an interdisciplinary artist born in Hawai’i and raised between West O’ahu and Seattle, currently based in Los Angeles. His practice spans oil painting, charcoal drawings, and archival video, often extending into installation and material experimentation with surfaces such as raw canvas, linen, and found textiles. Drawing from his Filipino and Black American heritage, Oclaray’s work reflects on his family’s layered histories of migration, labor, and belonging. Through recurring imagery of domestic interiors and exteriors, floral motifs, and familiar objects, he explores how environments shape identity and memory, blurring the boundaries between figure, landscape, and pattern. Oclaray received his BA in Studio Art from UCLA in 2025, where he was also active in cultural programming and community organizing through the Cultural Affairs Commission.
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In his current body of work Evidence of Dreams (in Living Rooms), Oclaray reimagines the living room as a landscape of migration and memory; into a space where fragments of family archives, labor histories, and collective dreams of “paradise” and progress converge. Across his practice, he seeks to construct visual languages and folklore-like scenes that reflect the fluid and in-between states that define the contemporary diasporic and post-colonial experience. These constructions are embodied through figurative, collage-inspired, and slightly playful charcoal drawings of relatives, close-friends, and self portraits on textiles that weave these experiences together.