THE GIBSON REPORT

THE WHITE TRIANGLE (2017) Oil on linen, 24 x 30 inches My reaction to certain kinds of art is sometimes, even unknown to me, historically circumscribed. I see a certain kind of painterly construction and my response is an echo of the same response I had ten years or more ago, when I witnessed a similar image in a gallery or museum setting. Perhaps I now bring to it a greater range of echoes, and over time I develop new language to enrich and aggrandize the nature of my experience. The paintings of Eric Brown fall into this category. His recent solo exhibition, Punctuate, on view at Theodore Art in Bushwick, was a quiet revelation. These overly simple works use color and gaps in space to create subtle tensions. His use of titles expands their impact as metaphors for the human experience, which can be dramatized and quantified with so little apparent industry. Take “The White Triangle” for instance (all works 2017). This painting involves the use of three areas of bright color: re...

I had a studio visit on May 9 th with Keiko Narahashi, whose work was part of my exhibition at The Educational Alliance Gallery in 2004, an exploration of cubes and grids titled SQUARED. I was curious as to what she’d been up to, and contacted her on her web site. It was great to see her and catch up. She had a little bit of everything from her creative history on view, so I was able to consider her growth. There had been a lot of it. I can’t speak to all the growth, but can give you a snapshot of a few of the moves she has made. Narahashi is still a sculptor, though she has moved through more traditional modes of expression like ceramics, from the painted canvas constructions I saw before. Those were experimental and were a movement away from painting. There is still a strong color element in her work but it operates in concert with a very fragile quality of form, to the degree that it seems most ephemeral. Only in her most recent work is the painterliness returning. ...

ESSAY BY DAVID GIBSON The artist is a natural idealist who begins with form and ends with meaning. When Kathleen Elliot first began to discover herself as an artist she had an immediate interest in the use of glass to create forms reminiscent of nature itself—branches presenting leaves, flowers, and fruit, which over time coalesced into abstract forms as doppelgangers for the real objects she wished to emulate. Every artist develops a world view through their work that may not manifest in linguistic terms. However, the protracted activity of art making, developing the channels of meaning, and growing through the stages of one's discipline, makes one adroitly sensitive to the importance of a value system to accompany it. There is a fervor to the new way of thinking about how art can reflect life in these tumultuous days of political rancor. It’s been building for 20 years and is finally peaking in every corner of society.   The voyage of the artist is, less ...

TV 8 (Chicago), 2007 - 2008 chromogenic print mounted to plexiglas + wood frame    20 x 22 x 2   inches edition of 7 + 2 A/P   I have viewed Joy Episalla’s work in different contexts over the years, but it was only within the 2016 iteration of MoMA PS1’s “Greater New York” tercentennial that I was made specifically conscious of a body of work that surprised me. The work was a series of photographs taken in hotel rooms where the artist had stayed, in which she aimed her camera at the darkened TV screen to reflect the details of a used temporary residence, one that typically keeps no remnant of the visitor. As someone who spent a certain period of his life traveling for his career, and spending some time in such generic spaces, I was drawn to her series. The weighted existentialism of spatial portraits depicted in the uncharged screens of switched off televisions left me numb. DG: I was wondering if you could tell me h...