Joe Gibbons is a singular figure in the history of American experimental cinema. He is widely regarded for the incomparable, dryly humorous works that he began making in the mid-1970s. At the time, Gibbons was considered a pioneer of Super 8 filmmaking, however he left this intimate home movie format behind in the late 1980s to work in 16mm and video. His dynamic output has been featured in four Whitney Biennial exhibitions (1995, 2000, 2002, 2006), and he is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the NY State Council on the Arts, the Creative Capital Foundation, The LEF Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Over the years Gibbons has taught at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Pratt Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The majority of Gibbons’ films and videos center on a protagonist named Joe Gibbons. This guy looks, speaks and even behaves like the filmmaker, however you might say that he is an intensified, more performative and fictionalized version of the artist. Existential, megalomaniacal, paranoid and ultimately doubtful of the direction that life is taking him, Joe tends to live on the margins of society. He hates working and instead makes ends meet through less legitimate means. Whether avoiding parole officers, dreading the day ahead or contemplating another scheme, Joe’s self-reflective monologues break the fourth wall by being addressed directly to the camera.
