Postgresql array data types

What is the recommended method of working with Postgresql's array or JSON data types in Laravel? It doesn't necessarily need to use Eloquent -- I'm willing to sacrifice a lot of Eloquent goodness to be able to use the power of Postgresql arrays.

The application problem I'm trying to solve is tagging hundreds of thousands of items and then retrieving items that have certain combinations of tags (e.g. tag1 and tag 2 and tag 3; tag 1 but not tag 4). I feel like the native indexing capabilities of Postgres will come in very handy here for performance. Not to mention being able to avoid JOIN hell.