UNDERDONK PRESENTS: LOGAN SIBREL LEMME BE YOU
Curated by Danielle Orchard
87 RICHARDSON STREET
JUNE 13-JULY 5
OPENING RECEPTION: JUNE 13, 7-9
GALLERY HOURS: SATURDAY/SUNDAY 1-6 AND BY APPOINTMENT
(GALLERY WILL BE CLOSED JULY 4)
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Logan Sibrel makes paintings, drawings, zines, and music about memory,
boredom, and fandom. Working with figures from pop culture, he paints the darker
aspects of nostalgia–unchecked obsession, transferred narcissism, and a self-effacing
desire to inhabit a world outside one’s own. The finished works are a tease. They have
the makings of a narrative–faces familiar from 90’s pop culture, Pasolini films, and
country music that tell us nothing about their context; stills from gay porn; lines of
oblique dialogue–but the artist is really more interested in elision, with having the
authority to decide what not to include. He plays around with invented autobiography
and posturing. The lines written in his zines and throughout his paintings are full of half
truths. They read like false diary entries that remain tantalizing despite the reader’s
knowledge that they’re mostly invented. Sibrel talks frequently about what he considers
the “compulsive reveal” in his work (I think of a teenage boy positively bursting with
emotions that couldn’t possibly have been felt this deeply, ever).That stuff is certainly in
the work, specifically in the artist’s generous and empathetic treatment of sentimentality
and maudlin youth. But what I see as a major force in the work is less the compulsive
reveal, and more his masterful use of concealment. By carefully arbitrating what a
viewer sees, while including traces of the information being omitted, he engineers the
kind of nagging curiosity that keeps the National Enquirer in circulation. The artist uses
deceptively shallow means to confront the unsteady and fragmented nature of identity.
-Danielle Orchard
LOGAN T. SIBREL 