Jeff Gibson:
Asylum & Smoke

Jan 1 – 31, 2011
Thurs – Sat, dusk to 11pm
UVP Everson
Everson Museum Plaza
401 Harrison Street
Syracuse, NY


About the Work


In “Asylum”, Gibson takes a leaf from each of his two most recent artist’s books: “Dupe: A Partial Compendium of Everyday Delusions” (a dictionary of quasi-clinical, art-world pathologies; sardonic but earnest) and “Sarsaparilla to Sorcery” (a picture book exploring perceptual ambiguities between allusive abstract photographic images and taxonomic illustrations swiped from an old Encyclopedia Britannica). Through a chain of slow, poetic dissolves, the video blends psychologistic text with dreamy, morphic imagery into a weirdly visceral stream of consciousness. Similarly, “Smoke” combines quack psychological text with abstract photography and pages appropriated from encyclopedia, this time the World Book series. However, whereas “Asylum” is slow and panoramic in range, “Smoke” is faster, shorter, and distinctly gothic in character—more pointed, and, though humorous, blackly so.


About the Artist


Jeff Gibson is an Australian-born, New York based artist who has worked in a variety of media and contexts—painting, photography, video, posters, banners, and books, for galleries and public spaces. A former senior editor of Art&Text magazine, Gibson moved to New York in 1998 to work for Artforum, where he is currently managing editor. In recent years he has produced two artist’s books (“Dupe: A Partial Compendium of Everyday Delusions” and “Sarsaparilla to Sorcery”), exhibited on the Panasonic Astrovision screen in Times Square as part of Creative Time’s “59th Minute” program, and mounted solo shows at the New York Academy of Sciences and Luxe Gallery, New York. He is represented by Stephan Stoyanov Gallery (formerly Luxe) in New York.