Existential Anxiety to Chew On
by Emma Fiona Jones via The Provincetown Independent
Viewing the exhibition that now inhabits an airy gallery at the Fine Arts Work Center is an act of self-discipline: standing there, I mentally untie the rope knotted around the doorknob that suspends an array of objects from the rafters, snip a hole in the distended milky-white jug hanging overhead, and tip over the spindly ladder fit for a field mouse that leans against the wall.
“Everything here is on muddy ground,” says Jeff Gibbons, a multidisciplinary artist living in upstate New York. A 2023–2024 visual arts fellow at FAWC, Gibbons has returned to Provincetown for eight weeks as a Stephen Pace Artist-in-Residence. As part of this residency for mid-career artists, he was given access to the center’s Hudson D. Walker Gallery to create an exhibition.
Gibbons is standing near an orphaned metal drawer lying on the ground under the aforementioned jug. Sand, imprinted with a pair of footprints, fills the drawer. The sculptural installation, titled Adhoc Art Adhoc Life, began with a visit to the beach with another FAWC fellow during his earlier residency.
“I was walking behind them, watching their footprints fill with little pools of water,” he says. “I thought, ‘I need to find some sort of box that I can seal the prints inside of.’ And then we got back to the parking lot, and there was this old sink that happened to have these drawers in it that would hold water.” In the exhibition, a small hole in the jug allows a stream of water to slowly erase the footprints.
The instability of the work reflects our current tenuous state of existence, Gibbons says. “It’s riffing off where we are right now as humans: the gray zone — of the human mind, the body, this interference in our ability to conceptualize either infinity or death,” he says.
This muddiness — not quite solid, not quite fluid — also characterizes Gibbons’s way of working. The installations, sculptures, and paintings that fill the gallery are a mix of works that Gibbons started but didn’t finish during his previous residency, works he created during his time away, and site-specific installations responding to the space itself.
Gibbons’s 2024 exhibition at FAWC, “mushwomb to mushtomb,” drew on the ecology of Provincetown, bringing together roots, rocks, clay, paint, and other natural and synthetic materials in hesitantly hopeful vignettes. And yet the work exuded an unshakable forlornness: a microscopic chair perched on the edge of a leaf, a squiggly drawing of a mailbox gaping open expectantly.
