Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood: M+B

M+B is pleased to announce Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood, an exhibition of new works by Mark Thomas Gibson. This is Gibson's second solo exhibition with the gallery, and will run from October 23 through December 4, 2021. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, October 23, from 6 to 8pm. 

"Just when you thought it was safe…" In Mark Thomas Gibson's work, America's past just will not stay dead, even if it might choose to play dead for a news cycle or two. In our collective longing for respite, for closure, we might hold a premature victory parade, or a premature funeral, we might wave a flag or post a placard or plant a sun-faced daisy. But all the time, whether or not we'll admit it, we know that a sequel is coming soon, another chapter in the unending saga of white supremacy. In the background, we might glimpse a white-robed figure slipping into a manhole, we might hear the faint scritching of white-gloved fingernails against splintering wood, stifled crunching noises behind drawn white curtains. We might notice that the face of the daisy is suspiciously blank, the tips of its petals pointed like little white hoods, we might start to wonder whether even our hopefulness is rooted in something more sinister.

Indeed, a certain degree of paranoia ends up being a useful coping mechanism for approaching this body of work. We might be drawn to a posy of hothouse flowers, only to find ourselves questioning what background this decorative overlay is meant to cover up, whose hands planted and tended these painstakingly cultivated blooms. To the extent that our ideas about beauty, heroism, patriotism, optimism, progress - are received ideas, from whom did we receive these ideas in the first place…and in furtherance of whose master plan?

Even Gibson's images with the greatest graphic punch reveal strategic layering, conflicting registers, backstories and secret histories. The present reveals itself as a paper-thin scrim pasted over a seething, steaming morass of unacknowledged and unexpurgated sin. Corroded, corrosive backdrops eat away at the certainty of the line; a public pool - a perpetual site of racialized contestation - turns out to be 1,492 feet deep; Biden's victory procession (in a knowing nod to Ensor) is relegated to the background of a parade of horribles with a hooded figure (perhaps a self-portrait?) clinging precariously to a perch in the margins. With its startlingly cropped and layered images, Gibson's A Klansman's Progress - a update on Hogarth's Rake's Progress - pulls us into the gravitational force of the narrative even when we know how the story will end. We have to look, and it is testament to the power of Gibson's vision that we keep on looking.

-   Monica Youn, 2021