Part of Summer 2002
Pleasure Dome is honoured to host Gary Kibbins as he presents P & NOT-P (1994), The Alien Seaman (1998), Carl Andre’s Overalls (2001) and unveils his brand new video, Limbic Moments (2002).
“For almost two decades, Gary Kibbins has been making work that focuses and plays with the readings of images. Kibbins’s tapes and films, his visual and verbal essays as well as his ongoing practice of photo-montage, gleefully mix documentary stocks and conventions with found images, theoretical conceits and absurdly realistic narratives. There are, of course, not one but infinite possible narratives and associative thoughts for every individual found object, archival image, or dramatic re-enactment. But Kibbins is anything but an unreflective celebrant of endless free-fall or apolitical relativism masquerading as anarchic chaos-theory. He is a serious investigator into the languages of image and thought-control, an artist both fascinated and terrified by all-encompassing belief systems and structures. Kibbins’s body of work is unashamedly academic. It might even seem pedantic with its fascination with systems and their checkpoints, but those who say so have neither watched nor listened closely. Kibbins’ body of work delights in ideas and conceptual pretexts, but also skewers them. These invigorating collage-essays are both resolutely formal and wildly irreverent. They are very serious while simultaneously exceedingly comic.” (Andy J. Paterson)