We are delighted to welcome US-based painter Jeff Gillette to Stavanger for his first Scandinavian solo exhibition.
A Fine Art Masters graduate from California State University, Jeff Gillette has been making collages featuring accoutrements of Disney culture for over two decades. Recently, he was brought to the world’s attention through his participation in Banksy’s 2015 Bemusement Park spectacular, Dismaland, even being credited as an inspiration for the show in some quarters.
Despite the seriousness of his observations, Gillette sees ironic and amusing juxtapositions that occur when Disney, corporate logos, and pop icons from consumer culture show up as building blocks of shanty settlement construction.
His works reflect these ironies as well as add a playful dimension to art historical relationships: the addition of pop cultural references serving to sharpen the satirical stance of the message in his work, where everything is otherwise entropic and terrifying.
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Artist Statement
I travel to the most wretched places on earth for inspiration for my art: to third-world slums. From as recently as the spring of 2012 when I had a guide take me through the tiny, dark alleyways of Dharavi in Mumbai, India, all the way back to the late 1980’s when as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal, I visited all of India’s large cities and their megaslums.
Besides India, I’ve ventured into favelas, barrios, bastis and shantytowns, experiencing urban blight in North Africa, Southeast Asia, Central and South America, Mexico and Bangladesh. Aside from the seething humanity, the suffering, the unfairness and cruelty of the slum is a strange beauty. The cacophony of filthy debris rising from oceans of garbage comprises an architecture of depravation and necessity.
What emerges is a living environment of aesthetic wonder, spectacular visuals of space, color, form, and texture. These images, I re-create in the all too-realism of my “slumscape” artwork, in drawings, paintings, sculptures and installations.
-Jeff Gillette
