Olivia Gibian: Perishable Dimension

Everything has its own pace: mountains, currents, clouds. Nature as an orchestration of different rhythms and timescales. Strata of rock fold together, forming tangles of ancient matter. Driving on the freeway, Los Angeles is a blur. The topography, jagged hills and severe infrastructure, collapses into impressionistic layers—disorientation as city life. Perishable Dimension, Olivia Gibian's second solo show with 839, explores these states of transition. Rather than viewing composition as a process of fixing forms, Gibian embraces flows of color and spontaneous gesture, activating the canvas as a field of change. For Gibian, emergence and decay are intertwined. Images come to life and images fall away. These paintings enact and trace a process of becoming. Gibian develops these works in stages. She first paints with cold-process dyes on large-scale canvas and linen, applying color and washing it away, cropping and stretching the fabric to highlight moments of interest. The artist then builds up the surface with oil paints—levels of rich pigment atop the soft saturation of the pictorial ground. The results are properly atmospheric, airborne landscapes tilting toward abstraction. There is a precision to the openness of these works. They go on and on and on. In You Are My Everlovin', a jagged burst of color interrupts the gently psychedelic backdrop. Named after a song by avant-garde violinist Henry Flynt, the painting cites the lucid drift of drone music yet upsets its typically tranquil rhythm. Skies, a punchy, small-scale work, finds a fissure in traditional landscape painting; a cloud-like form dissipates and the apparent ground caves in on itself. Bottom Feeders, a long, slender work with a viscous composition, uses dark tones of red, blue, and black to invoke the depths of unknown waters. Each piece hints at the subtle processes of the natural world. Gibian finds inspiration in her work as a florist (another ephemeral pursuit). She draws on an informal lineage of vernacular abstraction that includes the visionary paintings of Arthur Dove and Charles Burchfield, the folk-art and craft traditions of her Appalachian upbringing, and the subversive bricolage of DIY punk aesthetics. This latest series extends Gibian's interest in improvisational methods, as well as her earlier engagements of watercolor as a dynamic and characteristically fluid medium. Perishable Dimension registers a practice of patient observation and reflects an unsettling awareness of ecological change. These paintings speak to the enduring vulnerability of a world in flux. — Nick Earhart Olivia Gibian (b. 1988, Selma, AL) is an artist living in Los Angeles. She received her BFA in painting and printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2011. She has exhibited at 839 (Los Angeles), the VAMA Gallery of Los Angeles City College (Los Angeles), Utopia (Kingston, NY), Other Places art fair (OPaf, San Pedro), Treasure Town (Brooklyn), and William King Museum of Art (Abingdon, VA). She is the lead vocalist in the LA-based punk band, Never Work, and plays synthesizer in noise improv trio, Star World. In fall 2024, 839 presented Selected Ambient Works. Perishable Dimension marks the artist's second solo exhibition in Los Angeles.