Art is spilling out of Brian C. Gibson’s head nearly faster than he can make it. Gibson, who longtime Weekly readers might recognize as the singer and guitarist for local experimental/noise band Wax Pig Melting, is well into his Boytoy Summer art residency, which is running through the end of November at the Inside Style space in the Arts District (1119 S. Main Street). It comes after another monthlong residency at Brett Wesley Sperry’s Cube Gallery pop-up, which followed other seat-of-the-pants residencies at Nancy Good’s Core Contemporary and elsewhere.
“I promise you, I am a strong contender for most ‘informal artist residencies’ in Las Vegas in a row,” he wrote on Facebook a few weeks back.
“Tiger, Sans Stripes” by Brian C. Gibson
Gibson is filling those opportune spaces with everything he’s got. Boytoy Summer will include his paintings (“Abstract impressionism, baby,” he chuckles, when asked to describe his style), a sound sculpture created in collaboration with musician William Boscoe Davenport and no fewer than 10 volumes of his Scanner Lightly zine, featuring scans of original sketches he will eventually destroy.
It’s a big, risky venture, but Gibson is going at it full bore. And he’ll jump into the next opportunity as well, he says, whether it’s in Vegas or at the Goldwell Open Air Museum, where he sits on the board of directors.
In a recent walk-and-talk around the Arts District, Gibson talked about how it feels to let your art do the driving.
You’ve toiled for a good amount of time in Vegas’ cultural scene, first as a musician and now as a visual artist. How do you feel about where Vegas is at right now? Where we’re at now is awesome. All these people moving into Vegas, in the last year or two, is great. Now we’re really gonna start seeing what they’re doing. You know, they moved here, took a year to settle in, began f*cking around with [artistic] ideas. And I think, in the next year or two, we’ll really see a push that’s, like, “Where did this guy come from; where did this person come from?” They’re just now going out to get coffee and say hello to people.
Everybody’s coming here and planting their own seeds of culture. I did the same [recently] when I went to Berlin and London. … I didn’t feel alone out there. I saw myself times a million, because everybody out there in the crowds was an artist: “Oh, what do you do? Artist, artist, artist, writer, photographer.” I love it there. I come from a desert, where everybody’s into EDM or drinking too much or whatever it may be.
I know a lot of people who make art to help them make sense of life in Vegas. Is that you, too? Vegas assaults you into doing something. I feel assaulted living out here. People joke about the “deserts” in my poetry, and I never understood why until I traveled further than California. Like, “Wow, it’s green. There are people. It’s calm.” This is brutal.
Art makes it better. And for the month of November, you’ve got a great space to make it. Dude, it doesn’t make sense for me to have that space. … I’m kinda scared to go into this. I’m meeting more people that have been here for decades and have stakes in the city, and they kind of make it go culturally or socially. I don’t know what that means yet. I’m only 33, and my 20s were just Bunkhouse and making music; I wasn’t very serious. Now I’m trying to do some [new] things, and if I just shut up, I can figure them out.
How did you jump from making music into visual art? It’s funny. You know that guy from [Vegas indie band] Black Camaro, Tom Miller? I was recording the last Wax Pig thing at Naked City Audio, and Tom had an art show upstairs [at Downtown Spaces]. I was like, “What does he think he’s doing? He’s a singer and guitarist.” I went up there, and I was really intrigued by the amount of sarcasm you could fit into [a piece of visual art]. It’s truly a great medium for the way you can deliver a sucker punch.
Music is fun, but art is a whole other language. … Music didn’t get boring to me, but painting has so much more. It’s amazing to see one idea portrayed through, like, a million fractals, if that even makes sense.
You’re not abandoning sound art, though. What can you say about Boytoy Summer’s sound sculpture? The “Coin-Operated Orchestra.” William [Davenport] has had this idea for about a year or two, but we’re redoing it so that the public can kind of f*ck with it now. We’ll have a plexiglass enclosure with three guitars. They’ll have their own stands, or just be sitting on top of a table, and they’re on, plugged in. … You throw coins into the enclosure and hit the guitar with the loop pedal on, and it just keeps going.
What’s next, after this year of residencies? I’d like to go to either LA or, pipe dream, to Berlin, to make work out there and then show it, because shipping don’t make sense. I want to get out of Vegas or—here’s option B—to implement the artist-in-residency program for Goldwell by next summer. I’d like to share what I’ve had, truly, because a lot of people asked me how I got it.
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