Photo by Aimee Farnet Siegel
Mixed media artist Terry Gibson at his 2023 exhibition, titled "Everyday Icons," at The Front NOLA.
JonBenét Ramsey, Princess Di, Anne Frank, and Amy Winehouse—all tragic muses to the artist Terry Gibson, and beloved.
Even a cursory glance at any one of his necklaces, tributes to the departed, might make you wistful and cheery at once. The works are colorful and memorialize these and other public figures readily familiar to students of modern history and fans of pop culture. Made with unorthodox materials such as Gorilla Glue, Suave deodorant, USPS packing supplies, and stock images printed off at the Alvar Branch of the New Orleans Public Library, the pieces lack guile and concretize the crude aesthetics of folk and outsider art. They are packaged in shrink-wrap for safekeeping, more closely approximating the heedless handling of mass-produced merchandise than the punctilious treatment typically given to works of fine art.
But closer examination reveals the sophistication of Gibson’s iconography and their inherent allegiance to Louisiana, his homestate. At times, the artist explicitly elevates legends local to his native New Orleans (i.e. portraits of Lil Wayne and Irma Thomas), but more often (and with more subtlety) he honors the ground beneath his feet by choosing to integrate its rituals of death and grieving into altars for global icons to transcendental effect.
While individual works vary, the necklaces typically feature two-sided color images and are embellished with a scattering of glitter applied to chunky primary-colored frames. Sticker hearts and platitudes (today is a new day; dream a dream) further ornament the picture plane, which descends from whimsically beaded hangs (sometimes adorned with satin rosettes, wooden letters, and plastic beads) or melted plastic. While they are sold and marketed as necklaces (vaguely reminiscent of Mardi Gras beads), they are better suited for the wall than the neck, though they are certainly constructed sturdily enough to withstand wear (Gibson transports them over the Industrial Canal via bike and scooter, kept safe from ruin flat against his chest).
The necklaces figure into the categories VIP and RIP (and occasionally both); the former is reserved for the living—though only liminally. Because the works are all undated, we can read their subjects’ assignment to either category as a time stamp that reveals our culture’s fascination with their celebrity or with their death.
Photo by Aimee Farnet Siegel
"Prince, RIP" from Terry Gibson's 2023 exhibition, titled "Everyday Icons," at The Front NOLA.
Holistically, the works comprising the collection—which are prolific if not innumerable—can also be read as a subterrain where the living interlude with the dead. Time is suspended and collapsed here; on any given piece, célèbres of the present day and yonder coalesce, regardless of their association (or lack thereof) in life. Gibson’s subjects include Abraham Lincoln, Little Richard, the Wicked Witch of the West, Clint Eastwood, Fats Domino, Taylor Swift, Dolly Parton, Rihanna, Daffy Duck, Poppy the Pygmy Hippo, and Prince. I maintain a wishlist on my phone: Scarlett O’Hara with Rhett Butler, Britney Spears, LaToya Cantrell, Joan Didion, among others.
Gibson vends both pre-made works and works made on commission (my Amy Winehouse is a product of his own genius; my Anne Frank a request), revealing his orientation towards process rather than result. His cell phone number is prone to change, so when I am in town and ready for a new piece, I leave my name and number at Faubourg Wines in the Marigny and typically hear back from him over the course of a day. We meet on their patio, where he shows me the posters he is working on and his new selection of jewels.(Lest I reveal my bias, he once gifted me a rosary with beads that spelled “LAUREN A SWEET CANDY HOT GIRL LAUREN” with “VIP” on the pendant and a bone-colored crucifix attached, along with a bracelet to match: “LAUREN IS BLESSED.”)
Gibson’s art is derived from strategies first applied by Pop artists in the twentieth century to address formal concerns. By borrowing the likenesses of celebrities, products of consumerism, and other widely-distributed images sourced from mass media, Pop artists attempted to draw audiences’ attention to the style and construction of a given work of art instead of the muse itself; their logic followed that when an image is seen by a viewer with enough frequency, its rendering can supplant the primacy of the depicted.
While a formalist approach is essential to fully appreciating the ingenuity of Gibson’s work (his resourcefulness is informed by skills he gleaned while incarcerated), and his prolific output compares to that of other Pop artists (think Andy Warhol’s “Factory”), his art also advances the interests of earlier aesthetic movements of the twentieth century, integrating the sentimentality of Abstract Expressionism with the archetypes and fetishes common to the work of the Surrealists who preceded that.
In these new creations, Gibson’s sincerity usurps Warholian irony, serving as rejoinder to his predecessor’s cool remove. These works show the artist’s hand quite literally, with their handcrafted molds, his handwritten memos, and his hand-to-heart consolations and declarations of love—so strange, so clever, so sincere, so sweet.
