New York collage artist Chambliss Giobbi often refers to his work as temporal cubism. Avante-garde constructions pushing the boundaries of what might be accepted as status quo.
Either notion could be applied to Chambliss Giobbi’s body of work, SE7N, presented by 101/exhibit in Miami during Art Basel, December 4 through January 31.
SE7N features 7 large-scaled works in support of the Seven Deadly Sins, as well as two other select bodies of work, Tiny Portraits (Friends and Family) and Grease Monkey (Indian Larry, above).
A 44 page limited edition catalog will accompany SE7N and features an introduction by Walter Robinson. Walter writes, “Amalgamations of photographic images that have been torn into pieces and sutured together like Frankenstein’s monster, Giobbi’s pictures are explosions of fractured flesh, hairy and flaccid, their surfaces smoothed over and sealed with a hard coating of beeswax and varnish, as if to protect the viewer from contagion. With his preference for black-and-white images, Giobbi gives his scenes a sense of pollution and grime -- a permanent grayness -- suggesting that the visual regime of today’s world threatens us with emotional and physical annihilation.”
Chambliss assembles mythological amalgamations of The Seven Deadly Sins with shreds, shards and torn photographs taken in his studio. No small feat, as thousands of repurposed photographic material is meticulously applied to the aluminum surface of his constructions measuring 56 x 92 inches each. Time is one of the essential narrative ingredients incorporated within Giobbi’s innovative style. Chambliss Giobbi describes his approach to his work, “It’s not really about the process, it’s just how it comes out. I just look to see what happens when it all comes together.
Chambliss Giobbi was born in New York City in 1963. He earned his BFA in Classical Music Composition from Boston University in 1986 before shifting into the field of contemporary visual art. He was the past recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (1991) and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996.
Giobbi’s work has been featured in exhibitions in Barcelona, Bucharest, London, Detroit, New York and Miami. His work is held in the permanent collection of the Museo De Bellas Artes in Santander, Spain. Giobbi lives and works in New York City.
SE7N by Chambliss Giobbi is on view at 101/exhibit in Miami, opening December 4th with an artist reception on December 6th. (Read more here, Contemporary Collage, Seven Deadly Sins, Exhibit Catalog).
