Americans are constantly inundated with information. We are tethered to the information superhighway, where various media platforms determine how we define our cultural values. When it comes to themes related to race, the opaque nature in which individuals decide what’s right or wrong, fact or fiction, is often subjective and mediated by mass media. This phenomenon causes a slippery slope wherein facts seem complicated but aren’t, and what might be shared experience becomes individualized. A Retelling  presents multidisciplinary artist Mark Thomas Gibson’s extensive research and visual archive of race in proximity to American culture and identity. Through an ensemble of works that engage with the complex history of painting and caricature, Gibson explores the potentiality of retelling by creating a palimpsest of American history. Each work presented is evidence of memories that have resisted erasure.

A Retelling  is anchored by excerpts of Gibson’s Town Crier  series, works on paper that demonstrate his catalog of various historical moments through satirical gestures. Utilizing humor to emphasize the obscene, these drawings are delivered through a caricature that Gibson has aptly named Town Crier, a play on the 19th-century anchorman who acts as a public authority by making public pronouncements that society deemed true. Relying on appropriated headlines from various news sources, Town Crier  delivers the news as a performative act of cathartic mimesis. The comedic cadence of Town Crier  pokes fun at the way information is passed on, produced, and retold from news sources and how power structures and information technologies impact our collective reality.

This exhibition excavates facts, fiction, and the things in between that define and complicate our understanding of American history and humanity.