ALICIA GIBSON: BACKSEAT BINGO

Marvin Gardens presents “Backseat Bingo,” a solo exhibition featuring paintings by Alicia Gibson.

Electric in both color and tone, the paintings of Alicia Gibson vibrate with frenzied energy reminiscent of a DIY punk aesthetic. Just like a photocopied zine might be filled with personal photos, favorite albums, or inside jokes, so too are Gibson’s canvases replete with references to the artist’s lived experience.

Within each packed painting is a collaged menagerie of peculiar ephemera—receipts, letters from home, sparkly doodads from Southern dollar stores—interspersed between scrawled text, often in the form of double entendre, that can scan as cutting insult or humorous colloquialism.

The words themselves all originate as something Gibson’s read, said, or heard that, for a particular reason, stuck with her. Often ruminating over these phrases for days or weeks before committing them to canvas, she’ll paint them somewhat to exorcise them: express and then on to the next.

Part automatic poetry, part autobiographical entry, these works are intentional divulgences, albeit occasionally couched in parodic stereotypes, that allow viewers a glimpse of Gibson’s life writ large. Piece by piece, these compositions of individual idiosyncratic fragments offer a wider lesson on the power of vulnerability to spark growth.