“Patronage is a recurring theme with me,” Brian Gibson says. “People keep giving me an extended hand, and I take it.”
The experimental musician, video artist and abstract impressionist painter speaks of the places and people who have enabled him to create and share his art, from Nancy Good’s now-defunct Core Contemporary gallery, to Downtown-based interior design studio Inside Style, to the Goldwell Open Air Museum in Beatty. Patronage has allowed Gibson to grow and take risks as an artist, and he couldn’t be more grateful for it.
“The name of the show came from [artist and PeaceNartStudio gallerist] Alexander P. Huerta, who passed away a couple years ago,” Gibson says. “Izaac [Zevalking, of Recycled Propaganda] once said to him, ‘Hey, man, why are you always giving away your wall space for free? To these artists who don’t pay anything?’ Huerta goes, ‘One day, you’ll understand.’
“Izaac knows what it’s like to have a platform and to see people hungry to do stuff, and he extended his hand out to me,” Gibson adds. “I’m taking full advantage of that.”
Brian Gibson at home in Las Vegas
Gibson’s Recycled Propaganda show, named for Huerta’s risk-taking, allows the artist to fully showcase what those various residencies have allowed him to do. One such piece, “Flower Power Outage”—a mixed media collaboration with Brett Sperry and Deana Khoshaba, from Gibson’s residency at Sperry’s closed Cube LV gallery—reflects Gibson’s prodigious creativity; it’s five by seven feet, with excess canvas that “drips” onto the floor. “Prince, Circa ’99” is a five-foot square hand-embellished giclée, as is “Fate; Altered.” The show also includes smaller works for purchase, not hanging on the walls.
And on weekends, in a nod to the residencies that shaped the show, Gibson will hang out with these works and create more, taking breaks to relate the stories that go with them. “Those stories have mostly lived in my head,” he messages me. “This is the first time they’re attached to the paintings, in the same room, with me there to tell them.”
And on August 29, Gibson will continuously screen In Relative Obscurity III: Stay Here, the latest installment in his ongoing video and music series, created at Goldwell’s Red Barn Arts Center.Artsy AF show next door. Spreading the patronage. Extending a hand.
(Photographer Holly Lay documented the project and created a photo book to accompany it; you can see that, too.) That August Saturday—really, any weekend day this month—is a perfect day to embrace all things Brian Gibson, while throwing a bit of love to Jeff Lewis’
BRIAN GIBSON: ONE DAY, YOU’LL UNDERSTAND Thru August 31, Monday-Friday 11 a.m.-9 p.m., Saturday & Saturday 10 a.m.– 9 p.m, free. Recycled Propaganda, recycledpropaganda.com.
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