SPEAKING TO THE TREES KISSING THE GROUND

This singular work by one of the USA’s foremost Native artists, Jeffrey Gibson (Member of The Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, part Oklahoma Cherokee), was one of a group of works commissioned for the final room of the inaugural Sydney Modern exhibition Dreamhome: stories of art and shelter. SPEAKING TO THE TREES KISSING THE GROUND, with its bell-like form, responds to a specific item from Gibson’s collection of Native ‘whimsies’, souvenir objects created in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries by Native Americans, which Gibson first encountered as a young artist researching the Native collections of The Field Museum in Chicago. With their impure combination of Victorian decorative taste and traditional Native beading, which led to their being valued less highly at the time than other Native artifacts and artworks, the whimsies resonated with the young artist, who felt that he too stood in more than one place at once. For Dreamhome, Gibson reimagined the whimsies as heroic, highly physical presences whose velvet skins and intricately beaded symbols also reflect the artist’s love of club culture and the more-is-more aesthetic of his artistic hero, Australian performance artist Leigh Bowery. Among the beaded forms attached like badges and patches to the surface are lightning bolts, leaves (based on those found in his own backyard in the Hudson Valley north of Manhattan), exhortations, vintage badges proclaiming ”THINK GLOBALLY ACT LOCALLY” and “TEACH PEACE”, sections of historical beading from Gibson’s collection, and mesmerising faces. Inset like a kaleidoscopic portal within the work is a canvas shaped like an arched church window, vividly painted and transmitting a poetic and hopeful phrase typical of the artist. The phrase ‘speaking to the trees kissing the ground’ is particularly telling, and speaks to an understanding within native culture that the natural enviroment and those that live in it are one and the same.