University Art Museum
Well/Being: An Exhibition on Healing and Repair
August 4 - December 11, 2021
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Jeffrey Gibson
Jeffrey Gibson, Nothing is Eternal (still), 2020, video, 18:14; color, sound, courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York [image description: A person in a leather courset and fish-net stockings with the USA flag projected on them.]
In Jeffrey Gibson’s Nothing Is Eternal (2020), conceived during the pandemic era and filmed in upstate New York shortly before the 2020 presidential election, we see local faces—each in isolation—views of rural towns, and American flags projected on bodies, all showing the complexity of the concept of community. The various iterations of the flag reveal it to be both unyielding, as a marker of territory on bodies, but also elastic in its meaning and identity. The idea of elasticity remains central throughout, as the video addresses, in the artist’s words, “our social collapse” as well as the “reinvention of self and community,” specifically reinventions of Indigenous and queer identities. In a work that is at times mournful and apprehensive, viewers will also find moments of striking beauty, such as the spectrums of color refracted from morning dew clinging to spiderwebs.
Jeffrey Gibson
Born in 1972 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Lives and works in Hudson, New York.
Selected solo exhibitions include When Fire is Applied to Stone It Cracks at the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York (2020-2021); Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer at Madison Museum of Art in Madison, Wisconsin (2019), at Seattle Art Museum in Seattle, Washington (2019), at the Denver Art Museum in Denver, Colorado (2018), and at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson, Mississippi (2018); and This is the Day at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas (2019) and at the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York (2018).
Gibson’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, New York; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas; Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts; the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada; the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.; and the Denver Art Museum in Denver, Colorado, among others. Selected grants and awards include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2019); Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grants (2012 and 2015); and a Creative Capital Foundation Grant (2005).
Gibson received a B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois in 1995 and an M.A. from the Royal College of Art in London, United Kingdom in 1998.