Meet James Gilbert | Sculptor & Installation Artist – SHOUTOUT LA

Lyons Weir Gallery, New York

Chrystalistasis explores the work and practice of 50 artists during this unique time of isolation and social unrest. Online group exhibition

It May Be Time to Rethink the Way You Think, 2017, hand-dyed canvas, polyester rope, wood, wax, 88 x 40 x 27inches

A Narrow Passage, a multidisciplinary exhibition featuring the work of Lana Duong, James Gilbert, Jenalee Harmon, Megan Mueller, Jenny Rask, Nicolas Shake, Katya Usvitsky, and May Wilson, has already been received with great fanfare. Major media outlets like the Los Angeles Times and the international publication, Art Week, have been promoting the show, as well as well-respected regional outlets, like Curate LA, Art and Cake, Venison Magazine, Asymmetric Magazine, and DoLA:

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Noysky Projects presents A Narrow Passage, a multidisciplinary exhibition that explores themes of constriction, compression, and concealment as a way to relate to personal biographies.

Abstract works from A Narrow Passage are comprised of materials that twist, turn, bond, choke, or smother to the point of collapse, while others have approached constriction in a more gratifying way, like the comforting sensation of a warm embrace or the euphoric feeling of pleasure derived from pain.

Artists have used the compression of space as a visual device to relate to the body for thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians wrapped the body in ornate sheaths that accentuated the unique forms of the individual, while providing familiar biographical landmarks to aid the spirit in its journey to the afterlife. Shibari, a form of Japanese rope bondage developed during the Edo period, was used as a decorative device to display captive prisoners like trophies, creating complex patterns and shapes that pressed into the skin. Twentieth-Century works from Man Ray and Christo & Jeanne-Claude have used concealment as a means to invoke mystery, transformation, and revelation, while Eva Hesse and Jackie Winsor put the body back into abstraction, using hands-on processes and tactile materials that actively rejected the detached qualities of the minimalists.

Many of the works in A Narrow Passage employ elements of playfulness with form while acknowledging the weight and density of the artist’s chosen materials. Some of the works in A Narrow Passage relate to the quirks of the body, straddling the line between fragility and rigidity, using irregular, organic forms. Others have used tension to reveal internal conflict, illuminating our efforts to adapt to our new political realities while also protecting the ideas we cherish most.

An exhibition of new sculptures, drawings and photographs from Los Angeles based artist James Gilbert and Paris based Garth Bowden.

This exhibition is the culmination of an on-going conversation between the two artists and their individual studio practices. For the first time, the artists have proposed a joint residency together in France where all work is created along side each other, in response to each other, specifically for this exhibition.

This dialogue between the two artists marries the language and structures of primitive visual forms with images from contemporary pop culture. Setting in play contradictory elements – objects of symbolic meaning used for ritual and cultural identity versus objects devoid of meaning – the products of consumerist pop society such as plastic toys, games and cartoons.

There is an interest in defining a period of our collective history and cultural understanding. Drawing from the vitality and power of primitive tribal art and the banal objects of pop culture, both artists seek to compress these apparently opposing elements into objects of meaning and humour.

“The conscious search in history for a more deeply expressive, permanent human nature and cultural structure in contrast to the nascent modern realties.” Stanley Diamond, “In Search of the Primitive”

LeStudio, Paris, France