Submerge, 2007
Jeffrey Gibson
Oil and spray paint on canvas, 84" x 120"
Photo: courtesy Arin Contemporary Art

Jeffrey Gibson's 2007 painting Submerge, for which his May show at Arin Contemporary was named, uses the language and materials of street art to describe a monumental visual conflict. At the far left of the 7-by-10 foot canvas, spray paint in bubblegum neon colors forms a tangled mass of squiggles whose shapes are evocative of a jumbled Twombly drawing. These marks seem in the process of being swallowed up by a great dark cloud. This mass, which covers more than half the painting, is sewn together by a swirling thread of black spray paint and traversed by wide, sinuous brushstrokes in a heavy felt-like navy and a rich plumy purple.

Gibson, a Brooklyn-based artist of Cherokee and Choctaw descent, has been strongly endorsed by the Native American community and was recently awarded the Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art and included in the National Museum of the American Indian's 2007 group exhibition, "Off the Map." Gibson's work is non-figurative and does not overtly address this heritage; instead his work seems to engage with broader themes of popular culture and pop art. Gibson's marks in spray paint, and his brilliant neon colors, are more influenced by the graffiti tagging of the 1980s and 90s than the use of self-consciously graphic stencils, stickers, and screen-prints of contemporary street artists Banksy, Shepard Fairey, or Swoon who have taken the art world by storm since the mid-2000s. The wide brushstrokes in many of Gibson's paintings, especially those in Slice and Dice (2008), have a jokey, ironic quality suggestive of Lichtenstein. Other works on view at Arin Contemporary included a series of smaller canvases from 2008, also in oil and spray paint. Reminiscent of Roy Colmer's spray-gun paintings from the late 1960s, these paintings feature regular bands of color interwoven with spray paint and oil. Wrapped and Bound and Singular, both 60-by-50 inches, seem made for print. Metallic silver bars are interspersed with shocking fuchsia and a thin tomato red. Gibson doesn't often play with perceptual confusion, as did Colmer, but in Singular, patches of pure silver emulate a reflection of light off the canvas, an effect that is heightened rather than diminished by the glossy pages of a magazine or catalogue.