Broadsheet

A seductive sliver of cleavage spills from beneath a lawyer's tailored white blouse as she leans over a stack of legal texts. Caught mid-performance, a rock star clad in a black concert T-shirt and leather-studded bracelet grips her microphone with defiant authority. Playful bathing beauties with arched backs and dazzling smiles wield their superficial glamour over several crouching, cowering nudes. At first glance, the unlikely group of figures portrayed in artist Deborah Gibbon's "Identity" series seem gathered for some kind of surreal casting call. Yet despite this apparent incongruence, these subjects are united by the artist's very real facility for exposing the historical promise and limits of figural representation in western art.

In this series, Gibbon's subjects assert powerfully individual yet disturbingly partial identities through an exacting process of visual editing that conceals as much as it reveals. Subjects like "Beth, Lawyer" and "Kara, Rock Star" for example, become palpable personalities through carefully articulated poses, hairstyles and wardrobes while the bathing beauties like "Magnolias" and "Crimson" strike a more nostalgic, if equally familiar chord in their association with the "low" art genre of the Pin Up. For each provocative, crisply rendered detail put forth in these brightly colored canvases, an equal amount is obscured. What makes these women so immediately compelling but ultimately unknowable is the fact that they remain mere outlines or silhouettes. Present in form and gesture, they are literally absent as bodies. Where we expect to find markers of individual identity in faces and flesh we are met instead by hauntingly blank, if formally dynamic negative space.

As Gibbon has noted, the series employs the historical conventions of the Nude and Pin Up in order to explore how these internalized pictorial devices "impact our contemporary and very complex notions of identity." The desire to intimately connect with and consume the identities and bodies of the re-worked Pin Ups and professional types is at once solicited and suppressed. A similar tension between the known and unknowable is achieved in works like "Loop" and "Horizon" from "The Nude" series through a wholly different set of artistic conventions. Absent of identifying personal or professional markers, these vulnerable, anonymous nude figures contort within ambiguous compositional spaces. Convincingly corporeal, their faces remain obscured by their outstretched hands. We are invited to gaze upon their expressive, exposed bodies but are denied access to their individual visages.

Gibbon's work explores deeply entrenched pictorial traditions that force the viewer to confront the ways in which identity is projected and perceived within a distinctly contemporary system of visual commerce. In so doing, she has created a compelling body of work that successfully challenges western assumptions of beauty, identity, gender and established paradigms of visual production and consumption.