Jeffrey Gibson, Beyond the Horizon: Kavi Gupta | 219 N. Elizabeth St. Floor 1, Chicago, IL, 60607

Kavi Gupta presents Beyond the Horizon, a solo show of new works by Jeffrey Gibson, acclaimed visual artist and 2019 MacArthur Fellow.

Gibson’s aesthetic position is rooted in the spaces where narratives collide. The work recontextualizes relationships between popular culture, identity politics, personal experience, memory, and canonized versions of history, inviting viewers to question the myths and assumptions that empower contemporary social structures.

For Beyond the Horizon, Gibson brings together four new bodies of work: mixed media paintings; large-scale, quilt block paintings; beaded bird sculptures; and a monumental wallpaper installation covering two walls of the gallery. The works integrate a broad mix of source content, including representations of, by, and about Indigenous people; literary tidings of cultural resistance and cooperation; and materials referencing multiple interlocking modernisms.

Each work in Beyond the Horizon exemplifies Gibson's deft ability to intermingle popular culture, literature, art history, memory, politics, myth, and material meaning. The source content he so insightfully remixes into new forms incites questions about whose representations of people and cultures should be validated; which memories and artifacts should be exalted; what creative products should be deemed to have constructive social value; and who decides. These works feel starkly original and idiosyncratic, but unified—a phenomenological manifestation of the complex, interwoven cultural fabrics that compete within our contemporary social space, and yet keep us stubbornly, inextricably bound.

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