Funhouse Waiting Room | Mary Gibney

Mary Gibney combines paintings, drawings, collages, monoprints to create a layered, dense environment, along with found props which accompany and amplify the art. Her upcoming exhibit at Rosalux Gallery, Funhouse Waiting Room, expands her curiosity about people and places into bar scenes, vintage circus strongmen with their overtones of homosexuality, faces of bar patrons, and a mysterious little creature in strange nature settings. She has an ongoing obsession with body parts and the porous boundaries between male and femaleness. Handmade-ness permeates her work as she creates images directly on the painting surfaces, making mistakes and revisions critical to the overall shape and feel of the work and using imperfection as a tool to invite the viewer to connect emotionally. Central to her artmaking is collecting and reusing ephemera to create intriguing, often humorous juxtapositions. Funhouse Waiting Room also includes a sketch series with altered/defaced pages of the 1959 Wards Catalog using ads of men and boys as a riff on gender and hidden urges.

Her upcoming show at Rosalux will create an art environment of clustered paintings and drawings, built up surfaces of sketches and inspirational images and displays of handmade & found objects as a sort of room-sized cabinet of curiosities. She will attempt to get as close as possible to overwhelming the viewer while simultaneously inviting them in to examine her devotional art space. 

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Mary Gibney lives in Minneapolis and is a current member of Rosalux Gallery. She has also exhibited at SooVAC, Hair and Nails, Intermedia Arts, TuckUnder Projects, 801 Washington Ave, Artists in Storefronts, Circa, Katherine Nash Gallery, and many other spaces.
 

Editor's note: See our Interview with Mary Gibney as part of the 2021 Sketchbook Project

GALLERY HOURS
Rosalux Gallery hours are Saturday and Sunday from 12-4 PM or by appointment. The gallery is located at 315 West 48th Street in Minneapolis. Rosalux is free and open to the public.