The Dangerous One: Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery

In the fall of 2018 I began teaching at Tyler School of Art and Architecture. When I arrived in Philadelphia I was contacted by Sid Sachs, a notable curator in Philadelphia, and was offered an exhibition at The Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery in Philadelphia, PA. 

The work in this show was the first where my drawing would take center stage and the flat color of my previous work would be left behind. The concept of the show was to reflect on history through anecdotal tableaus. The exhibition title, The Dangerous One, was designed to frame a set-up by describing a humorous event with the phrase, The One About… 

This set-up would align with all of the work in the exhibition, allowing the grim facts of history to slide and play with fantasy imagery that spoke to desire. Images oscillated from Andrew Jackson's battles in Florida to imagery of Klansmen in hell. This exhibition also included a Negro Rifle Association Flag produced by flagmakers in the city of brotherly love and sisterly affection as well as shirts with the same logo design, distributed at the exhibition to invoke the question of ‘would I or could I wear this?’ 

From the Rosenwald-Wolf Press Release:

Dark humor is necessary at a time like this: it helps us to remember that all is not lost! In his drawings, Gibson shines a high-key light on the grim and gritty social realities of contemporary America with a biting humor. His work depicts sweeping narratives of a dystopic America, and implicates every viewer as a potential character in this narrative. He therefore reminds us that everything is at stake and that we are all in this together. Gibson’s work is bristling with the energy of immediacy, using a largely-unedited drawing method that allows for improvisation, humor, the comic and grotesque. In his hands, the comic is used for its powers of transformation. Gibson feels that this moment in American history can be a cleansing, a reorientation back to empathy and love, but that this process requires a kind of reckoning, a purge of negative spirits flowing around us in the everyday. The Dangerous One lays bare a cycle of American history that feeds directly into the contemporary: dark times in the creation of America, a nation’s failure to acknowledge its own fear-based hatred, and a contemporary moment where the nations of the world retreat into themselves and attempt to force out invaders in a continued refusal of acknowledgement. Gibson’s drawings remind us that we must collectively acknowledge the fears used to stoke the flames of our country’s history, and the pressing need to continue to grow energetically in order to move beyond our collective history. As he says: “We see around us the Rooster coming home to Roost; the dawn is near. So, smile.” In Gibson's work, the smile can be dark because it reflects an inevitable future: we have to get down to get up.