Jeff Gibson “Hard Sell”

Jeff Gibson “Hard Sell”

LMAKgallery

This event has ended.

LMAKgallery presents Hard Sell,a solo installation in our outdoor courtyard by New York-based artist Jeff Gibson. Consisting of a cluster of five custom-designed, double-sided A-frame signs bearing cryptic configurations of shape-fitted, silhouetted product shots, the exhibit’s comically assisted readymades defy our expectations of both art and street-level advertising.

Four of the A-frame signs combine dichotomous commercial imagery (e.g., red meat and microphones, fried food and hairpieces) selected from the artist’s extensive image bank of appropriated jpgs, appearing at once familiar and uncannily off. The fifth sign presents a two-part taxonomy of fake greenery—artificial hedges, astro-turf, plastic ivy, and so on— that sits in weird dis/harmony with the classically urban, grungy setting.

The taxonomic aspect of Gibson’s work stems from his childhood love of dictionaries, compendia, and illustrated encyclopedia. To quote the artist: “I am fascinated by typological systems, codes of social and cultural conduct, or any institutional effort at fixing meaning or aesthetic standards.” Gibson scrambles these codes with a Punk attitude, upending their authority while tweaking our perceptions and assumptions.

Jeff Gibson is an Australian-born artist and occasional critic who has worked in a variety of media and contexts—photography, video, prints, 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. Since arriving in New York, he has produced two artist’s books (Dupe: A Partial Compendium of Everyday Delusions [2000] and Sarsaparilla to Sorcery [2007]), 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; Stephan Stoyanov Gallery (New York); Theodore:Art (New York); and The Suburban (Chicago and Milwaukee). Throughout January 2011, two of the artist’s videos, Smoke and Asylum (both 2010), were projected onto the facade of the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York, as part of a curated series presented by Light Work and the Urban Video Project. His video Metapoetaestheticism, 2013, was exhibited in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. In 2016, Gibson produced a billboard, titled Armagarden, for the I-70 Sign Show, a curated program of artworks occupying advertising sites on the Missouri interstate. In conjunction with this project, he also produced a foldout poster for the Sunday opinion pages of the Columbia Tribune. Gibson’s work was included in the “Digital Infinity” section of the 2018 Front International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art.

Media

• Installation

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