2021 New Editions: Jeffrey Gibson
Over the past decade, Jeffrey Gibson has built an impressive multi-disciplinary practice, becoming an anchor in Indigenous Futurism. Using recognizable Native materials such as beads, fringe, and jingles in his sculptures and substituting elk hide drums or stretched deer hide in lieu of canvas as a support for his paintings and prints, Gibson creates powerful statements that reorient the place and status of Native art within contemporary culture. His colorful, graphic, and text-inclusive works are laden with multiple layers of both blatant and subtle meaning mined from his personal experiences, in turn also offering a unique representation of broader Indigenous and queer identities.
“I’m trying to make everything – garments, performances, paintings – that exist in my personal exploration about what modernity means within Indigenous cultures.” – Jeffrey Gibson
We are thrilled to announce the first two editions Jeffrey Gibson has completed with us.
Jeffrey Gibson, A Time For Change, 2020. Click to view.
When Jeffrey Gibson began working in our studio, he did not hesitate from asking if it would be possible to print on handmade elk hide drums. While the abstract pattern and color palette used in A Time For Change is reminiscent of Op Art, Gibson’s choice of material and printing surface firmly establishes a connection to Indigenous craft and identity. By embracing materials, visual patterns, and other signifiers of his personal identities as physical and conceptual elements within his work, he uses abstract art as a way to share who he is as an individual and to claim space for himself and other Indigenous artists within modern and contemporary art history.
To print on the elk hide, the drums first had to be sanded down to ensure a smooth surface. Next, they were sealed on both sides with an acrylic matte primer to prevent the hide from stretching as it continued to dry out. A special registration jig, or frame, was built to hold the drums in place during the printing process. Once registered, six different layers of ink were screen printed, including the luminous blend in the center of the drum. Lastly, a layer of acrylic gloss varnish was printed to protect the surface and enhance the vibrancy of the printed colors.
Jeffrey Gibson, POWER! POWER! POWER!, 2020. Click to view.
In POWER! POWER! POWER! Jeffrey Gibson proclaims and celebrates diversity and inclusivity, elevating a wide range of colors with the less than subtle exclusion of “white” from the list. Gibson often includes a wide spectrum of colors in his work and he smartly uses color as a conceptual element in addition to the more obvious visual effect. In his work, rainbows and blends of colors resist binaries that inherently set things up in opposition to one another.
The colorful stripes in the background of this print were printed from thirteen woodblocks in two runs, or layers. The remainder of the image was then screen printed, including the pearlescent black shapes that make up the background pattern and the text. A final layer of gloss varnish was also screen printed just over the “POWER!” text, making those words pop off the background even a bit more than the rest of the printed surface.
