Artist Audio: Jeffrey Gibson

JEFFREY GIBSON: I’m Jeffrey Gibson, and my day job was being an activities manager at IKEA in Bayonne, New Jersey.

Well I think that, you know, I don’t disassociate retail environments from art. The thing that’s interesting about retail is retail cannot transform a customer. Retail speaks to the core of who the customer is. It’s too expensive and too much work to try to change the mind with someone who’s coming in, looking for something. So, the way that it really operates is it has to appeal to what is already happening. Does that make sense?

VERONICA ROBERTS, curator of Day Jobs: Yes.

JEFFREY GIBSON: And so, there are certain things that I feel, like color and even just kind of how color and walls and light kind of move us through a space. We could talk about it certainly in very high art terms, you know, artistic terms. We could term it architectural, environmental, installation. We could probably have that same conversation and talk about retail and floor plan layout. And like, where do we need to put the plants? Where are people going to stop and look at the rugs? Where are they going to be able to throw them out? Or maybe we should have them next to the coffee tables so people could put the coffee table on top. So those conversations to me—I don’t really have a separate perspective on how I think about space. That’s not necessarily high/low to me. I’m more interested in how the environment feels and how that feeling kind of directs us to some degree, or at least presents us with maybe some choices, like some coherent choices.

And I think for the most part with exhibitions and color, it’s interesting to me. I mean, I’m not even necessarily critical of the white box space. I actually like the white box space for lots of things, because it gives you a clarity to be able to just focus on something. But I also am somebody who just inherently—I will overhang a show. I have no problem putting things right up next to each other. I like things when they cross sight lines. And I think that it’s a way for viewers to think about more than one thing, you know, and the connection between those two things. So, I think there’s always a conversation happening between things in a space. And that’s something that I always think about. One of the questions that comes up oftentimes when I’m working with curators is like, “Is it one piece or two pieces?” “Do you want people to see this as one piece?” And I’m like, “No, they’re two works, but they’re relative to each other.” And I think it makes it more experiential if you put them in a way where a viewer kind of has to see them together.