Gibson + Recoder : Transparency

Following the successful outdoor exhibition of their innovative, large-scale structure in Madison Square Park entitled Topsy Turvy: A Camera Obscura Installation, New York artists Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder present unique, film-based sculpture and installation works in their third Robischon Gallery exhibition entitled “Transparency.” Furthering their poetic engagement with light and sound in dialogue with architecture, Gibson + Recoder embrace the gallery space with their temporally evocative approach toward the medium  - such as  film as an experience of light, as a means of conveying images with meaning and finally, with the celluloid of film as an object itself.

Collaborators since 2000, Gibson + Recoder unite the rich traditions within art and experimental film. Utilizing film’s structuralist and materialist strands for sculpture, the artists’ conceptual work recalls the varied sensibility of experimental cinema that emerged in the 1960s in which the moving image was woven into the spaces of performance, sound and audience interaction. For this exhibition, the thoughtful duality within Gibson + Recoder’s vocabulary becomes evident upon entry with the two sculptural works Light Spill and Threadbare. The viewer is met with a pairing of opposites: one all-white projector in an unspooled state and the next projector mummified in its dark film. In the space nearby, the stilled yet compositionally active projection of Transparency alongside the contemplative subtlety of Atmos and the animated work entitled Loop, are all sensitively placed within their environment.  From one distinctive work to the next, the meaning of film is expanded into both unpredictable form and layered experience.

Within the context of the larger exhibition, Gibson + Recoder create a kind of culminating experience that presents light as essential by virtue of its ability to dissolve and create form. The artists’ non-narrative sensibility marries the objectness of film with the transitory quality of light and in doing so, offers a view into the nature of film’s illusion and further, perhaps reflects on the illusory nature of the world itself.

Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder have exhibited internationally at numerous museums, galleries, and film festivals including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York,, Madison Square Art , New York, The Kitchen, New York,  Redcat, Los Angeles, CA, Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive Berkeley, CA, Sundance Film Festival, Park City, UT, Tate Modern, London, UK, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, UK, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, Scotland, Viennale, Vienna, Austria, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt ,Frankfurt, Germany, Hartware Medien Kunst Verein, Dortmund, Germany, MuHKA, Antwerp, Belgium, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium, TENT, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, Serralves Foundation, Porto, Portugal, and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art , Kanazawa, Japan.