Jeffrey Gibson: Once More With Feeling
Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce Jeffrey Gibson: ONCE MORE WITH FEELING, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, running from June 1 to July 22, 2023. This exhibition will premiere nine new collages, incorporating found objects and images, beadwork, and textiles into intricate arrangements. Concurrent to the exhibition is the solo museum exhibition Jeffrey Gibson: THE SPIRITS ARE LAUGHING at Aspen Art Museum on view through November 5, 2023, as well as the launch of An Indigenous Present, a book conceived and edited by the artist.
Drawing on his Cherokee and Choctaw heritage throughout his varied practice, Gibson has turned to collage as a medium towards both self-discovery and inquiry into consumption, empowerment, and non-Western modes of relating to one another. The artist collects offcuts, paper scraps, objects, and imagery and stores them over decades in his studio. He assembles these disparate items to create new works, relating forgotten materials to the fractured history of Native peoples.
Networks of Indigenous kinship and care run throughout the exhibition, which shares its title with Gibson’s 2023 collage ONCE MORE WITH FEELING—the notable lyrics of Joan Armatrading’s “Love and Affection.” Set against a vivid red and green geometric background, the artist assembles found Native American handmade objects, like watch bands and belt buckles collected from online sellers with little discernible history, alongside an image of an unknown Native woman’s face. Taken from a book illustrating “primitive cultures,” Gibson rejects the image’s origin, presenting the woman anew, self-assured and autonomous from the settler’s gaze.
PRAYING FOR TIME (2023) addresses the work of the late 19th century American artist Elbridge Ayer Burbank who made portraits of over 1,200 Native people, often dressed in garments distinct from their own tribe or culture.
In Gibson’s work, Burbank’s portraits of sitters White Swan and Christian Naiche are confronted by an intervention of beadwork and vibrant patterning. Between them, typographic block letters spell out the work’s title—borrowed from a George Michael song. Burbank, among other ethnographic artists of the time, believed Native Americans to be a “dying race,” which Gibson confronts with an incisive political demand against erasure.
Indeed music is an ongoing influence for the artist, whose cosmically colored collage, PLASTIC MAN (2023) references The Temptations’ funky 1973 rendition of Norman Whitfield’s song of the same title. The work features three 1980s Playmobil figures framed in beadwork against a geometric pattern.
Exposing the extent to which Native representations have been circulated and appropriated by non-Native individuals, literally here as plastic figurines, Gibson pushes back against narratives that have been wielded to intentionally isolate or divide. Instead, his work brings materials back into dialogue with their origins, using this as a way to overcome the scars of colonialism and usher in a future of hope and joy.
Press release and images via Jessica Silverman Gallery.
