Gary A. Bibb Art Catalogue Raisonne': 2015

"Cardel"

mixed media w/ collage

6" x 4"

"Czardrene"

mixed media w/ collage

6" x 4"

"Fereka"

mixed media w/ collage

6" x 4"

"Matique"

mixed media w/ collage

6" x 4"

"Verado"

mixed media w/ collage

6" x 4"

At the Threshold Exhibition

Photo of Nisa Touchon Fine Art - Santa Fe - Gary A Bibb Exhibition May 8 - Jun 27

At the Threshhold of Becoming - Mixed Media Works by Gary ...

2015

Touchon Gallery

Santa Fe, NM

Photo of Nisa Touchon Fine Art - Santa Fe - Ad in the May Issue of THE Magazine of the Arts. Keep an eye out for it!

Review: ARTICLE FROM THE MAGAZINE (Santa Fe, NM)

GARY A. BIBB: AT THE THRESHOLD OF BECOMING THERE IS A FASCINATING NEW ENTRY TO THE ROSTER OF GALLERIES IN SANTA FE.

Gary A. Bibb’s recent solo show of mixed-media collages. Bibb, a midcareer artist living and working in Denver, creates painterly mixed-media works in unpredictable palettes that run the gamut from gloomy and menacing to lyrical and bright. The panels betray a well- honed practice that includes foraging for found objects— paper, cardboard, wood, metal—in alleys and industrial sites, intervening in the afterlife of this human detritus, and the process of selecting, organizing, and reconciling these disparate materials. The process is evident, too, in Bibb’s aesthetic. The artist begins with a space of disorder and conflicting energies, and through a layering process brings his materials into compositions that seem frozen in the middle of unfolding. Each panel seems to vibrate as these opposing energies actively work out syntheses: vibrant colors quickly shift and limn expanses of darkness, heavy layering brings supple texture to divots and creases, collaged papers peek out and interrupt the otherwise abstract milieu with pattern or pop-culture signifiers. Never entirely at ease, each work feels like a question, not an answer. Bibb refers to himself as a (Intregrated) Casualist, a highly personal and subjective approach to mark-making that is concerned with the alchemy of process, a process filtered through the multivalent, even mundane reality of daily experience.

This tendency toward “incompleteness” is evident in the body of work Bibb presents, as many works engage with similar formal questions. The most striking example throughout the exhibition is the reiteration of dominant horizontal and vertical lines engaging as a primary dynamic, in which the rest of the composition falls around this conflict to widely differing affects. Some of these dynamics become resolved into harmonies, others maintain dissonance. The strength of the exhibition is its multiplicity. Bibb has also been the creative and curatorial force behind several projects, often with leanings toward guerilla exhibitions or grass-roots inclusiveness using online exhibitions and a global network of artists. These include Remarque (2014, jackthehack-remarques.blogspot.com), in which international artists were sent digital works to complete and exhibit online, which Bibb sent out his own work to be installed in public places internationally by fellow artists and then documented, and Fluxface in Space (2010-11, fluxfaceinspace.blogspot.com), in which an international group of artists submitted work to be launched into orbit onboard Shuttle missions Discovery and Endeavor. These projects and initiatives are threaded by an ongoing interest in experimentation outside the traditional bounds of marketable, commodifiable art. The open- endedness of these efforts is paralleled in Bibb’s compositions.

—LAUREN TRESP

GARY A. BIBB - NEW WORKS

Press Release

On view, a selection of recent explorations by Gary A. Bibb into the realm of mixed media painting and collage. Bibb's unique sense of color and composition express a deeply felt concern with aesthetic considerations and the place of artistic practice in contemporary society. Intimate in scale, Bibb's rich surfaces invite the viewer to linger and discover unknown vistas in these landscapes of the mind.

2016