Jeffrey Gibson

Jeffrey Gibson’s I Was Here (2018) mixes documentary and dramatic styles and centers on Macy, a transgender woman and a member of the Choctaw Nation. Blurring the lines between a mystical, natural setting and Macy’s daily reality, Gibson’s film examines the private and personal routines of transformation and self. The film’s location, the Choctaw reservation in central Mississippi where Gibson’s family is from, plays a significant role in the film’s blend of spirituality, ritual, and the fantastical. The film was commissioned by the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College for Gibson’s 2018 exhibition This Is the Day.

Jeffrey Gibson’s one becomes the other (2014–2016) is set in the Native American archives and art storage of the Denver Art Museum. We see a man speaking Kiowa pick up a hand drum from a shelf and begin to play. A woman in a long, white dress with colorful patterns enters the halls, dancing in time. There is an improvised moment where an art handler asks to participate in the filming. He opens a drawer, and finds a Navajo weaving comb like his grandmother’s. He talks to the comb as if it is his deceased grandmother, bringing himself to tears. The sleeping objects are understood as living.

The video features six vignettes in which solo dancers move through urban and natural environments in New York City and Upstate New York. The performers employ a range of movement vocabularies. Some gestures respond to the surrounding landscape while others stem from voguing, a style of dance that evolved from the Ballroom scene, an underground subculture created by members of the Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ community in New York, which came to prominence in the 1980s. The video features live performances by vocalists and drummers playing rhythms from the African diaspora paired with audio recordings from a 2020 Black Trans Lives march in New York, where Gibson is based.