ALEX GIBSON: SLIPPERY SLOPE
OPENING: FRIDAY MAY 26, 6-8PM
MAY 26 - JULY 14, 2023

Someday is happy to announce Alex Gibson: Slippery Slope, opening this Friday, May 26 from 6-8pm.

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"Slippery Slope” -  the idea that a seemingly small, benign action will result in larger negative consequences. Global synchronization of timekeeping and capital efficiency have exacerbated the flawed belief that idle time will inevitably lead to catastrophic events. The desire to keep busy and intolerance for waiting has resulted in manufactured distractions, designed to suppress feelings of unproductivity - the fruits of perceptual bias and causal reasoning.

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Gibson’s densely-layered paintings both illustrate and challenge these logical fallacies. Gibson works primarily with dry pastels that he mixes himself from pigment and marble dust, harnessing the immediacy, transparency, and tactile potential of his medium through sweeping lines, tight scrawling, etching, shading, smudges, and blurs. Riffing on Hans Hofmann’s “push and pull” technique, his paintings rely equally on color as form to achieve a sense of spatial play and visual tension. The immediately-legible draws the eye before quickly disintegrating into muddy abstraction —the slippery slope of consequence where the viewer, seduced by namable representations, suddenly finds themself searching for cohesion within the amorphous.  Repeating forms such as stars, smiles, and squiggles recur in scattered short-hand; dream-logic notations rendered from multiple viewpoints. Fragmented figures, appropriated impartially from cartoons, movies, vernacular photography, and art history, are superimposed against abstract background as discrete vignettes which surface and submerge, entangled within frenetic latticework.

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Through these various gestures, Gibson resists conventional modes of interpretation and embraces the expressive limitations of painting. The density of his compositions stimulates an intrinsic desire to find meaning in unorganized data, only to demonstrate our vulnerability to pattern-recognition. They tease the viewer with subtext, but withhold a cipher to decode any clear, linear resolve - each thread narrative an impasse in a circuitous topography of gestural accumulation.