Jennifer Tibbets
VISAGES
 In the 1800's the pseudo-science of phrenology purported that most
personality characteristics were revealed through facial
characteristics. Today, facial readings still assist us in navigating
social terrain. In Jennifer Tibbetts' solo exhibition, each face-front
portrait is distinguished by a type of covering, The covering may
disguise a section of the face, or envelope it entirely. Tibbets'
paintings show the infinite variety of ways in which the human face can
be adorned, camouflaged, marked, scarred or otherwise altered to
indicate or obscure social standing, professional status, familial roles
or just plain vanity.
In Jennifer Tibbets new work, her signature gesture is gone, the gutsy
abstraction - gone. What remains is her deep engagement with the human
form in general and the human face in particular. Over the past fifteen
years, Tibbets has produced a substantial body of work that began with
the suggestion of the figure in space. Over time the figure became more
defined and eventually the paintings began to show paired figures. The
paired figures reappear in Tibbett's recent charcoal drawings entitled
Couplings where the seeds of the Visages paintings can be seen.
Inspired by newspaper photos of newlywed announcements, these drawings
result from Tibbetts' dispassionate probe into the workings of social
conformity and the practice of suppression of the individual for the
goals of the collective. In the progression from drawings to paintings,
disparate source images were transformed through Tibbet's process of
cropping, composing, editing and then painted with oils on canvas in a
representational idiom to form a gestalt that underscores her conceptual
concerns. Through images of doctors, tribesmen, soldiers and beautiful
woman, Tibbetts merges facial generalizations with idiosyncrasies so
that the resulting paintings seem oddly familiar, as if these portraits
are friends or relatives recalled from some other place or time. When:
Tuesday, April 6 - Sunday, April 25, 2004 - |
