Mark Thomas Gibson

Some Monsters Loom Large

March 24 through April 23, 2016

Opening reception: Thursday, March 24 from 6 to 8 pm
 

Fredericks & Freiser is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Mark Thomas Gibson.

"The ambiguity of Gibson’s main character — a worried wolf or coyote who struggles to survive in a harsh rendition of a Western-like movie version of the Land of Manifest Destiny — stems from the fact that this same critter also appears in the totally unsympathetic role of marauding cavalry soldiers stampeding under the banner of the Lone Star State, and as a member of angry demonstrating mobs. So if he is “Everyman,” then every man is his own biggest problem. And, thus we return to the ambiguous and ambivalent dialects of Walt Kelly. And also Philip Guston, who in the same era that Gil Scott Heron wrote his rap, cast everyone from Richard Nixon to the painter himself as that arch villain of American history, a Ku Klux Klansman. All of this noted, Gibson’s art is topical in the same way as Heron’s or even Guston’s. It is flat-out mythic. And flat-out — though deeply chiaroscuro and often wildly undulating — weird. Or, to revive another Seventies turn of phrase, outright trippy. His is a Book of Revelation by a prophet who isn’t afraid of going to hell so much as he is on full alert after having been there. In that regard Some Monsters Loom Large shares with the work of Raymond Pettibon not only graphic tropes, but an underlying sense of combined exaltation and despair. And a thudding, thumping soundtrack to which the lyrics are text fragments in disconcerting juxtaposition to uncanny images."         –Robert Storr