Jeffrey Gibson's artworks are a joy to the senses. There's indeed an auditory, tactile and visual quality about his creations: first they strike you with their colours, then you want to touch the materials employed to make them and hear the sound they make.
This dialogue between the senses is clear in the exhibition "Jeffrey Gibson: When Fire Is Applied to a Stone It Cracks" currently on at Brooklyn Museum (200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York, until 10th January 2021). But there is also another dialogue going on in the museum spaces, as the artist selected objects from its collection to display alongside his works.
This dialogue works pretty well as some of the rarely exhibited materials from the museum's Archives and Library Special Collections shed light on the formation of the institution's Native American collection and Jeffrey Gibson integrates elements of Native American art, craft, techniques and aesthetics into his practice.
We all live "layered existences" as we are the result of several experiences that we have had throughout our lives and on which we keep on building year after year. Gibson has got an incredibly layered identity as he has Choctaw and Cherokee heritage, but, being the son of a civil engineer in the US Army, he moved a lot in his life, living in Germany, South Korea and Britain.
This multi-layered identity comes out in some of his pieces that combine indigenous handicraft techniques and aesthetics, such as his paintings on hide and canvas, or iconic beaded punching bags, and it emerges in particular in his sculptures inspired by ghost shirts and liturgical garments.
These oversized colourful T-shirts - made with custom printed fabrics and embellished with all sorts of decorative elements including multiple rows of metal cones, a type of embellishment borrowed from Native American jingle dress - feature references to pow wow gatherings, include modernist geometric abstractions and hint in their combination of colours and text at the Pop Art works of Sister Corita Kent.
Gibson uses a term to describe this layered combination of cultural references - anthropophagy - a concept that, developed by Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade, revolves around the idea of absorbing, or cannibalising, other cultures to produce something new.
The artist has also got some connections with fashion: while a few of his installations include fabrics, garments or embellishments that are usually employed in fashion, Gibson claims he is inspired by fashion designers such as John Galliano, Rei Kawakubo and the late Alexander McQueen, by artist and performer Leigh Bowery, by Cherokee artist and educator Lloyd Henri "Kiva" (1916-2002) and by celebrated Zuni weaver We'wha.
It is surprising Gibson hasn't been invited yet by a prominent fashion house for a collaboration (he would be perfect for Dior's Lady Art project), but you can bet that will happen very soon.
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