SOUTHFIRST 60 North 6th Street Brooklyn, NY 11211 www.southfirst.org

JOE GIBBONS

Recent Drawings

January 24 – March 6, 2016

Opening reception, Sunday, January 24, 4 - 6 PM

SOUTHFIRST is extremely proud to present "Joe Gibbons: Recent Drawings" the first solo gallery exhibition of experimental filmmaker JOE GIBBONS. The works on view, all made during the past year and exhibited for the first time, consist of drawings with pencil, color pencil, and ink on paper. The exhibition also features three narrative sound pieces. The show is on view from January 24 – March 6.  

Gibbons has since the mid-1970s used Super 8, PixelVision and 16mm to create voyeuristic, paradoxical, and often comic explorations of everyday life and its existential problems. In this recent body of work Gibbons turns to the still image. “Recent Drawings” features over a dozen ink, pencil, and color pencil on paper drawings from 2015. The drawings are a departure from his work in film, but they continue Gibbons’ DIY aesthetic and his interest in probing contradictions that emerge from the quotidian. Some drawings document everyday items such as prescription medication, cough drop wrappers, or breakfast cereal boxes. Others point to a search for meaning: the covers of great books by Viktor Frankel or Nietzsche. Still others speak to glamorous lifestyles out of reach—advertisements from magazines featuring brand-name watches, or the stylized stationary of the new Whitney museum. Taken together, these seemingly documentary musings evoke an enigmatic, quasi-fictional world of externalized desires. The tone is yearning, the technique wry, and the drawings’ wavering stillness is a foil to a lifetime of filmmaking.

The exhibition was curated by Maika Pollack with help from the Friends of Joe Gibbons. The gallery would particularly like to thank Jim Gibbons, Andrew Lampert, Tony Oursler, and Anne Turyn, without whom this show would not be possible. The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication of drawings with an interview of Gibbons by Tony Oursler.

Joe Gibbons (b. 1953) was born and raised in Providence, RI, where he became familiar at a young age with Jonas Mekas’ writings about film in the Village Voice. He attended Antioch College in the mid-1970s, where he studied film and video with Tony Conrad. He holds an MFA from Bard College in film, and taught video for a decade as a lecturer at MIT. His influential short films and feature films have appeared for over 30 years in numerous venues including Anthology Film Archives, BAM, Light Industry, the Museum of Modern Art, the Pacific Film Archive, the Centre Pompidou (Paris), The Kitchen, ICA (Boston), and Hallwalls (Buffalo). His 2013 work “Confessions of a Sociopath” was included in “Best Films of the Year” lists in Film Comment and Artforum. He has received grants from the Creative Capital Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the NEA, among other organizations, and was included in the 1995, 2000, 2002 and 2006 Whitney Biennial.

SOUTHFIRST, founded in 2000, is located at 60 North 6th Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn between Wythe and Kent Avenues. Gallery hours are Sat. and Sun. from noon - 6 PM and by appointment. Subway: L train to Bedford Avenue. For more information, please contact the gallery at 718 599 4884 or info@southfirst.org.