Current
VHS (T.)A.P.E.
Gibson + Recoder
March 6 - April 1, 2020
Arts Night Out: Friday, March 13
Kinetic sculpture, light works, and paintings made using discarded VHS video tape, conceived during Gibson + Recoder’s recent artist residency at the Jentel Foundation in Banner, Wyoming. The title of the exhibition is a play on the Available Potential Enterprise (A.P.E.) of VHS video tape.
Gibson + Recoder have been exhibiting their expanded cinema installations and projection performances since 2000. Their works are in the permanent collections of major art museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, and Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, Germany. They live and work in NYC.
Below is a review of
Gibson + Recoder
VHS (T.) A. P. E from TIQUE, a publication on contemporary arts
Gibson + Recoder have always walked a high-risk high-reward tightrope throughout their career as they plumbed the raw materials of cinema–projector, film, light, electricity–to create elastic and challenging works and installations. Recently, they have focused their interest in discarded, obsolete, and/or forgotten cinematic media on the cast-offs from the dawn of late 1970’s home theater–the VHS cassette. They approach this once ubiquitous object with the cold eye of the amateur scientist, cracking open the cassette to sleuth out the secret inner life it might contain. And the result is an array of metaphorically rich, poetically charged, intellectually rigorous, and visually compelling drawings, collages, and both static and kinetic sculptures.
What is actually inside a VHS cassette is fairly banal stuff: an iron oxide-coated magnetic Mylar tape tightly wound around two plastic spools and various other plastic parts. Utterly disposable. Focusing their attention on the Mylar tape, Gibson + Recoder poke and prod this moribund material like alchemists to see if it can be revivified and transformed into something beyond itself. Once freed from its existence as mere cog in a machine–as a medium for transporting and disseminating information–what surprising new energies, narratives, and riddles does this tape contain?
Gibson + Recoder’s approach to their newfound material runs the gamut from sensual–almost loving–to clinical, while welcome touches of humor and absurdity provide entry points into their conceptual enigmas. The tension between old source material and reimagined artwork is palpable and bracing.
The VHS (Creases & Wrinkles) series is a laser-sharp, perfectly distilled representation of Gibson + Recoder’s exacting yet poetic investigations. Consisting of uniformly sized drawings on paper, the Mylar tape’s iron oxide paint coating is used to create wispy, perfectly pitched line drawings reminiscent of snaking, naked tree branches. They are gesture incarnate. But of course, these are really only drawings of the magnetic tape itself, composed from the very material that once defined its original purpose. Simple and straightforward yet deeply profound, these drawings are an ouroboros of material becoming metaphor becoming material again, etcetera.
Gibson + Recoder anthropomorphize the Mylar tape to great effect in VHS (Dropout). Comprised of a torrent of tape being poured from an aluminum trashcan hovering approximately 7 feet from the ground, this work wrings multitudes from simple means. It is a sculptural celebration of the tape’s lush materiality. It is the halted flow of motion, a welcome pause in the overwhelming flux of life. It is a person in costume with a trashcan hat. It is a funny sight gag forever trapped in time. The visual pun is a dangerous game, and for many artists it has proven to be a honeyed trap, an artistic cul-de-sac of defeat crammed with discarded one-off ideas failing to gain traction. VHS (Dropout) proves Gibson + Recoder know how to successfully occupy the fertile space between profundity and failure.
Falling somewhere between VHS (Creases & Wrinkles) and VHS (Dropout) is VHS (Sine Wave). Visually plucky and downright capricious in its refusal to stay put conceptually, this tightly composed yet seemingly off-hand kinetic sculpture continually vacillates from lyrical to deadpan. It is an endlessly fascinating impoverished cinematic experience made from a few commonplace elements. Resting on a chair is a box fan; attached to the grill of this box fan is a single strand of Mylar tape, which is propelled through the air, landing on and gathering inside an aluminum trashcan. The incantatory swirling of the tape created from the wind of the fan produces a line drawing in space, invigorated with life and ambition and purpose. It is a melancholic purpose, however, for the tape’s grand hurrah ends heaped in the bottom of a trashcan–such is the arc of life.
Ultimately, Gibson + Recoder’s work with the VHS cassette represents a resurrection and reincarnation, for dignity and purpose have been restored to that which has been discarded. And this is an idea that resonates with all of us: it is life-affirming, a testament to the hope of possibility and continuance in the face of our confusingly impermanent and often haphazard lives. Through these works, Gibson + Recoder are hinting at a universal energy coursing through all things, in a continual state of becoming, never stagnant, always striving to realize its full potential.
-Brice Brown, 2020
http://www.gibsonrecoder.com/
Gibson + Recoder
March 6 - April 1, 2020
Arts Night Out: Friday, March 13
Kinetic sculpture, light works, and paintings made using discarded VHS video tape, conceived during Gibson + Recoder’s recent artist residency at the Jentel Foundation in Banner, Wyoming. The title of the exhibition is a play on the Available Potential Enterprise (A.P.E.) of VHS video tape.
Gibson + Recoder have been exhibiting their expanded cinema installations and projection performances since 2000. Their works are in the permanent collections of major art museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, and Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf, Germany. They live and work in NYC.
Below is a review of
Gibson + Recoder
VHS (T.) A. P. E from TIQUE, a publication on contemporary arts
Gibson + Recoder have always walked a high-risk high-reward tightrope throughout their career as they plumbed the raw materials of cinema–projector, film, light, electricity–to create elastic and challenging works and installations. Recently, they have focused their interest in discarded, obsolete, and/or forgotten cinematic media on the cast-offs from the dawn of late 1970’s home theater–the VHS cassette. They approach this once ubiquitous object with the cold eye of the amateur scientist, cracking open the cassette to sleuth out the secret inner life it might contain. And the result is an array of metaphorically rich, poetically charged, intellectually rigorous, and visually compelling drawings, collages, and both static and kinetic sculptures.
What is actually inside a VHS cassette is fairly banal stuff: an iron oxide-coated magnetic Mylar tape tightly wound around two plastic spools and various other plastic parts. Utterly disposable. Focusing their attention on the Mylar tape, Gibson + Recoder poke and prod this moribund material like alchemists to see if it can be revivified and transformed into something beyond itself. Once freed from its existence as mere cog in a machine–as a medium for transporting and disseminating information–what surprising new energies, narratives, and riddles does this tape contain?
Gibson + Recoder’s approach to their newfound material runs the gamut from sensual–almost loving–to clinical, while welcome touches of humor and absurdity provide entry points into their conceptual enigmas. The tension between old source material and reimagined artwork is palpable and bracing.
The VHS (Creases & Wrinkles) series is a laser-sharp, perfectly distilled representation of Gibson + Recoder’s exacting yet poetic investigations. Consisting of uniformly sized drawings on paper, the Mylar tape’s iron oxide paint coating is used to create wispy, perfectly pitched line drawings reminiscent of snaking, naked tree branches. They are gesture incarnate. But of course, these are really only drawings of the magnetic tape itself, composed from the very material that once defined its original purpose. Simple and straightforward yet deeply profound, these drawings are an ouroboros of material becoming metaphor becoming material again, etcetera.
Gibson + Recoder anthropomorphize the Mylar tape to great effect in VHS (Dropout). Comprised of a torrent of tape being poured from an aluminum trashcan hovering approximately 7 feet from the ground, this work wrings multitudes from simple means. It is a sculptural celebration of the tape’s lush materiality. It is the halted flow of motion, a welcome pause in the overwhelming flux of life. It is a person in costume with a trashcan hat. It is a funny sight gag forever trapped in time. The visual pun is a dangerous game, and for many artists it has proven to be a honeyed trap, an artistic cul-de-sac of defeat crammed with discarded one-off ideas failing to gain traction. VHS (Dropout) proves Gibson + Recoder know how to successfully occupy the fertile space between profundity and failure.
Falling somewhere between VHS (Creases & Wrinkles) and VHS (Dropout) is VHS (Sine Wave). Visually plucky and downright capricious in its refusal to stay put conceptually, this tightly composed yet seemingly off-hand kinetic sculpture continually vacillates from lyrical to deadpan. It is an endlessly fascinating impoverished cinematic experience made from a few commonplace elements. Resting on a chair is a box fan; attached to the grill of this box fan is a single strand of Mylar tape, which is propelled through the air, landing on and gathering inside an aluminum trashcan. The incantatory swirling of the tape created from the wind of the fan produces a line drawing in space, invigorated with life and ambition and purpose. It is a melancholic purpose, however, for the tape’s grand hurrah ends heaped in the bottom of a trashcan–such is the arc of life.
Ultimately, Gibson + Recoder’s work with the VHS cassette represents a resurrection and reincarnation, for dignity and purpose have been restored to that which has been discarded. And this is an idea that resonates with all of us: it is life-affirming, a testament to the hope of possibility and continuance in the face of our confusingly impermanent and often haphazard lives. Through these works, Gibson + Recoder are hinting at a universal energy coursing through all things, in a continual state of becoming, never stagnant, always striving to realize its full potential.
-Brice Brown, 2020
http://www.gibsonrecoder.com/