Jeff Gibson
There is a point at which, in the mesmeric meeting of eyes, we realize a deception. And yet, even at that precise moment when trust turns to terror and love becomes loathing, the seduction of arrant charm is resolute. Gelled into a coagulum of fungoid growths, cancerous ruptures, and flaking decrepitude, Hollywood's dream-boats parade as presentiment of catastrophe. The pin-up boys haunt a nightmare terrain where poles of good and evil, youth and decay, have coalesced and entwined. Hermetic seals which once protected such dichotomies, close over their corrupted combine. Half-familiar faces meet our gaze of nostalgic desire as mutant parodies, possessing the spectral horror of death masks of a living dead.
To go beyond good and evil is to subvert a moral imperative, and this is the predicament with which Jeff Gibson's cibachrome series, Delusions of Grandeur,1 leaves the viewer. It is as if the movie ends at the revelation of deception, without any clear-cut dispensation of judgement. The situation just is.
As expose, Delusions of Grandeur figures "loss" itself. In mapping the loss of innocence we realize we have traced a loss of memory and time. To preserve our innocence, we may transfer the acknowledged "delusion" to the object of our gaze- it is "their" loss because in the first place it was "their" hallucinatory aggrandizement of role and (self) importance.
In so doing we choose to forget that it was also "our" preparedness to makebelieve that crystallized the illusion, even if we blame Hollywood's dream factory or the American dream itself.
One question arises concerning Delusions of Grandeur, that is, do these images blame? Is there an accusation or is there merely an articulation of loss? Similar... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline