My Take: Mark Thomas Gibson’s The Voyage at KDR305

Miami has a way of making you think about where you’re from—sometimes without asking. It’s a city shaped by arrivals, departures, reinvention. People come here to start over, to build something, or to reconnect with a version of themselves they left behind.

That’s why The Voyage by Mark Thomas Gibson, now on view at KDR305, feels especially grounded here. The show isn’t loud about its message, but it’s persistent. It circles ideas of return, change, and what it really means to call a place “home.”

Gibson’s work uses ships and the sea as recurring symbols. They reference classic ideas of journeys and odysseys, but nothing here feels romanticized. The water is unstable. The vessels are complicated. You get the sense that movement always comes with risk—and that once you leave, you don’t come back the same. That’s kind of the point.

One idea behind the exhibition touches on the old philosophical question: if something changes piece by piece over time, is it still the same thing? Applied to people instead of ships, the answer feels obvious. We change. Our cities change. The version of “home” we imagine often exists more in memory than reality.

That resonates deeply with how I think about Miami—and with the work I do as a co-founder of Powered By DMT. At its core, our job is about place: how environments are shaped, how stories are told, and how people connect to spaces that are meant to feel personal. Home isn’t just square footage or a location pin. It’s emotional. It’s contextual. It’s layered with history, ambition, and compromise.

Gibson’s work doesn’t try to define home neatly. Instead, it acknowledges that home can be fluid, unresolved, and sometimes uncomfortable. You can return to a place and still feel like a visitor. You can build something new while carrying old narratives with you. That tension is real—and especially familiar in a city like Miami.

What I appreciate most about The Voyage is that it doesn’t over-explain itself. It trusts the viewer to bring their own experience into the room. For anyone who’s ever left, come back, stayed too long, or never fully settled—this show meets you where you are.

Home isn’t a fixed destination. It’s something you keep renegotiating as you move forward. And in Miami, that negotiation is part of the landscape.