Jeffrey Gibson: TRADE at 222 Shelby Street

Publication: Journal Santa Fe Section; Date: Aug 26, 2011; Section: Gallery Guide; Page: S8

sampling the world JEFFREY GIBSON’S VIGOROUSLY VERSATILE WORKS AN INVITATION TO THE UNLIKELY Art Issues

MALIN WILSONPOWELL

For the Journal

Although it may be hard to believe, for those unfamiliar with Jeffrey Gibson’s previous paintings and installations, his eye-dazzling new bodyof paintings created for this exhibition in Santa Fe is comparatively subdued.

Although these constructed images are very bright, in earlier series he uses prismatic neon palettes that nod to the bioluminescence ofundersea creatures and the phosphorescent panache of Mardi Gras. Not only did those paintings look like they could light up the night, theyalso look like they are born with a shimmer in the dark igniting sparks and piercing shards of color as well as swirling clouds of paint.

Gibson’s primary practice is a pastiche aesthetic that goes back to indigenous cultural exchanges, i.e., TRADE, along with the art world’s seachange through the collages of Braque and Picasso. It is not a style so much as an attitude of openness to “sampling” what the world has tooffer.

Gibson’s dynamic contemporary mash-ups revel in the processes that bring his rambunctious compositions into existence, and they arrivewith a blizzard of associations. Gibson combines polymorphic sources and possibilities with serious and far-reaching intentions. They promptnot only re-considerations of art but, also, of the world.

All of the paintings in TRADE are un-stretched like hides, and some are hand-stitched with a heavy sinew recalling the assembly of NativeAmerican rawhide or parfleche bags and boxes. All of the canvasses are also embellished with glass beads and some with steel studs, lendinga touch of street savvy.

Tassels of glass beads surrounded by what look like plaited bead scrunchies for holding long hair in a pony tail are suggestive not only of achild’s natural bounce, or the swish of hanging decorations during a ceremonial dance, or the everyday pleasure of watching movement frombehind, or, maybe, the even more exotic and tawdry gyrating of burlesque pasties.

These works are vigorously versatile. There’s always a surplus of metaphors in every aspect of a Gibson painting, including his use ofcontrapuntal and complementary colors, in the use of the grid and its violations, in the central framing and destabilizing vectors.

A cosmopolitan citizen of the world, Gibson was born in 1972 in Colorado, and, as the son of a civil engineer, lived a nomadic existence,moving to South Carolina, Germany and Korea. He clearly has an appetite for waking up in new places and seeing what he can see in bothmuseums and markets. Joie de vivre tempered by a worldly maturity permeates his work.

No stranger to Santa Fe, Gibson first studied sculpture with Ernest Mirabal at Nambé Pueblo in 1992. A graduate of The Art Institute ofChicago in 1995, he received a Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians Tribal Scholarship in 1996 to further his studies, and completed hisMasters of Art degree at the Royal College of Art, London, in 1998.

This particular group of Gibson’s paintings is informed by work during his student years in the North American collections department ofChicago’s Field Museum: “One of the things that struck me was the variety and the origins of materials that objects were made from. Anobject categorized as being of native or indigenous origin may have been made with glass beads that came from Italy or Poland.”

Gibson acknowledges his “… references to multiple painting histories, including hard edge geometric abstraction, Op Art, AbEx, Futurism,Pattern and Decoration, plus street graffiti. Other sources that I look to include Native American textile and basketry weaving, geometricbeadwork, and parfleche container painting. Being Native American (Choctaw/Cherokee), I have grown up aware of these objects and I amalways considering their relationship to modernist concepts of abstraction.” Gibson’s insouciant and deeply considered work is a reminder thatnot enough has been made of mainstream modernism’s borrowings from Native American art.

Although his predecessors in painting and collage include Braque, Picasso, Hanna Hoch, Kurt Schwitters, Robert Motherwell and JamesRosenquist, his empowered capacity to deploy fragments that resolve their own internal concerns with metaphorical external concerns iscloser to the work of Roy Dowell, who is based in L.A. Gibson has the same sensibility of open-ended, finely nuanced connectivity that offersseemingly endless metamorphosis.

Like Dowell – who studied performance and video at Cal Arts – and is noted for his combination of meditative and nervous surfaceinteractions, there is a similar performative cast to Gibson’s bold acts of collage. Standing behind Gibson’s well-informed orientation at thevery center of contemporary art are also the breakthroughs of painter Kay Walking Stick, performance artist James Luna, and sculptorJimmie Durham, all internationally recognized artists born Native American.

sampling the world http://epaper.abqjournal.com/Repository/getFiles.asp?Style=Ol...

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Durham, who has lived in Europe since 1994, writes eloquently about Gibson, subtitling his essay “Mythmaker or Our Miles Davis.” Hespeculates that in the license the younger painter takes, “Gibson might be our Miles Davis.” Durham makes important linkages betweenNative American and African American gifts to the world. African Americans gave “Music so good that the rest of the world couldn’t help butsteal it, copy it, and join it.”

Scholar John C. Mohawk (1945-2006) first introduced me to the incomparable gifts Native Americans have given the world in philosophy,political theory, technology, agriculture and culture (as explicated in Jack Weatherford’s book “Indian Givers”). Gibson’s dedication to andfinesse in the arena of amplified abstraction reminds us that much of Western art has been confined to literary illustration and a servant tonarrative, and that most of the world’s indigenous art — or, in other words, most of the world’s art — is abstract. By operating with freshaplomb and sober sophistication, Durham sees Gibson operating outside the trap of identity enforced by colonizers.

Although Gibson has been included in at least three group exhibitions in both Santa Fe and Albuquerque since 2008, TRADE is his first soloshow gracing our city. Hopefully, there will be many more one-person exhibitions since his is a performance to watch. Gibson’s smartpaintings are suave, innovative, exuberant, generous in spirit, and an invitation to engage with unlikely materials and cultural interventions.If you go

WHAT: Jeffrey Gibson: TRADE

WHERE: 222 Shelby Street Gallery

WHEN: Will continue through Sept. 25. Tuesday-Saturday 10 a.m.-5 p.m. By appointment Sunday and Monday, call 505-699-2833.

COST: Free

CONTACT: 982-8889 or info@222shelbystreet. com


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JASON MANDELLA/COURTESY 222 SHELBY STREET

Three Bars is a 2011 acrylic on recycled and collaged painting with glass beads and steel studs by Jeffrey Gibson.

Blister in the Sun is a 2011 acrylic on recycled and collaged painting with glass beads and steel studs by Jeffrey Gibson.


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Dusk is a 2011 collage and acrylic on paper by Jeffrey Gibson.


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Jeffrey Gibson: TRADE at 222 Shelby Street