I Feel Mysterious
Olivia Gibb
Sunday, August 2
Tall Hill Creative | Oklahoma City
Art school took Olivia Gibb away from Oklahoma and up to Kansas City, which she’s called home ever since. But her influence still lingers, be it in the form of concert posters for DIY punk and hardcore shows, album artwork for bands like Glow God, or even the occasional hometown exhibit, like Sunday’s opening at Tall Hill Creative. Her work aligns very closely with the community she grew up in, as inspired by classic post-punk LPs as she is any artist or movement.
Her latest body of work, I Feel Mysterious, utilizes elements of the abstract forms — given texture and dimension with rough cuts and Xeroxed qualities — she’s long built her collage work with, but marries this to willfully simplistic sketches. This union is filled with subversive, youthful wonder and told with bold lines and restricted color palettes. To learn more about the exhibit, Oxford Karma spoke to Gibb about how her art has evolved over time, McDonald’s renovations, and nail technology school.
Oxford Karma: What would you say is the central concept driving the artwork seen in I Feel Mysterious?
Gibb: I would say that a big thing about making this body of work is accepting and being OK with not knowing why you do the things you do. In realizing that there is a certain inherent truth in just the acting of making. Pleasure derived from participating in a creative endeavor is pleasure earned. Meaning seems so unimportant to me these days. I’ve always been very concerned with aesthetics and a sort of emotional pull or longing that can be a perceived in a piece of art, and that’s usually as far as I want to take talking about it — because a lot of things I just don’t know.
OK: Why did I Feel Mysterious feel like the right title for this body of work as a whole?
Gibb: I actually chose the title before I made any of the work. The title is inspired from the Wire song “I Feel Mysterious Today.”
OK: How do you think it shows your evolution as an artist over the recent past?
Gibb: It feels so good making this body of work at my home privately. I’m so used to being in an institution and getting critiqued, and really, I’m so sick of it. I just made these drawings of the dumbest things I could think of, and it felt so good.
OK: You’ve done a little bit of everything as an artist — ceramics, quilt, drawing, etc. — but you seem to gravitate most towards collage. What about that medium seems to suit you best?
Gibb: I’m always pleasantly surprised at the way different shapes and textures or patterns can interact with each other and create a new image and new meaning. I find the process itself to be very intuitive, often times just playing with different pictures on a piece of paper reveals itself to be something entirely new. The notion of taking references from our world and marrying them to form a new one is magical.
OK: Of course, this marks a sort of homecoming art show since you moved up to Kansas City. How do you think Oklahoma City has changed since you left?
Gibb: There’s this McDonald’s on 23rd and Penn that, when I was a kid, had this really cool, kind of cheesy rock ‘n’ roll Elvis vibe going on, and it was really great. Then sometime later they remodeled it, and it became a kind of boring old mid-2000s McDonald’s. Then a year or so ago I’m in OKC driving down 23rd Street, and the McDonald’s looks something like what I would imagine an Urban Outfitters to look like. They added a second floor that serves as some sort of internet café; it’s very out of place if you haunt that area as much as I used to. I come back here and sometimes I feel like a ghost.
OK: You’ve worked with musicians on album art and concert posters over the years. What do you enjoy most about those projects? Along that line, how does music factor into your artwork and/or creative process?
Gibb: I love doing collaborations. There are so many good, young artists and talented friends across the country, and it’s always such an honor to make a T-shirt or tape cover or some flyer. The best artists in the country right now are young punks making the really weird and bitching art and music. It’s really fabulous. Music is so ingrained into my lifestyle that I hardly give it any thought. In a way, it’s kind of like reading a book; there is this sort of escapist quality to the act of reading, and I often feel that way with music that I really, really like. It’s like when you listen to Devo, and you get transported into this crazy, fucked-up sci-fi paradise, and it’s really a fantastic feeling to experience another world that way. And I think I try to achieve this sort of otherworldliness with my art, in a sense — this relatable place of strangeness.
OK: What plans do you have heading into the rest of 2015?
Gibb: Hopefully going to nail technology school sometime in the winter or spring.
