Billy Gibney’s new exhibition considers memory as something unstable: continually recalled, revised and reconstructed. The images, objects and faces we associate with particular moments can feel fixed, yet with every act of remembering they shift. Details disappear, others become exaggerated, and what remains becomes part record, part invention.
Developed over two years, this new body of work extends that instability into the physical construction of the paintings themselves. Volcanic rock, crushed glass, wax and marble dust accumulate across their surfaces, creating dense, uneven terrains that appear geological, scarred and excavated.
Fossils became an important point of reference for Gibney. As physical records of something that once existed, traces of bodies, behaviours and passages of time, they offered a way to consider how a painting might similarly preserve traces of memory. In these works, images are embedded into the stone-like surface as though partially preserved.
Faces and bodies emerge without ever fully resolving. Figures are cropped or obscured by shadow, producing the sensation of recognising something without being able to place it. Gibney is interested in this moment of almost-recognition: the way, as humans, we instinctively search for a face, and the unease that occurs when we can only partially find one. These figures become impressions, closer to the experience of trying to reconstruct someone in your mind and discovering that certain details are no longer available.
Elsewhere, heirlooms appear as recurring motifs. Long present within Gibney’s practice, these objects become vessels for the intangible things inherited between generations: memory, stories, trauma and history. Their apparent preciousness is complicated by their vulnerability. They tarnish, gather dust, acquire scratches and move from one set of hands to another, accumulating traces of the lives and events that surround them.
Gibney gathers his source imagery from an equally fragmented archive: his own photography, online auctions, old film stills, instructional manuals and historical archives. His process becomes one of excavation, interested in the moment of association when an image or object is stripped of its context and unexpectedly leads somewhere else entirely: to a person, a place, a feeling or a memory you may or may not have intended to revisit.
There is a fitting circularity to Gibney presenting this body of work at Oigåll. Before the gallery existed, before the building had a program or even a clear idea of what it might become, Billy was the first artist to place a work inside it.
Years later, he returns with an exhibition about what remains, what changes, and what we find when we return to something we thought we remembered.
Developed over two years, this new body of work extends that instability into the physical construction of the paintings themselves. Volcanic rock, crushed glass, wax and marble dust accumulate across their surfaces, creating dense, uneven terrains that appear geological, scarred and excavated.
Fossils became an important point of reference for Gibney. As physical records of something that once existed, traces of bodies, behaviours and passages of time, they offered a way to consider how a painting might similarly preserve traces of memory. In these works, images are embedded into the stone-like surface as though partially preserved.
Faces and bodies emerge without ever fully resolving. Figures are cropped or obscured by shadow, producing the sensation of recognising something without being able to place it. Gibney is interested in this moment of almost-recognition: the way, as humans, we instinctively search for a face, and the unease that occurs when we can only partially find one. These figures become impressions, closer to the experience of trying to reconstruct someone in your mind and discovering that certain details are no longer available.
Elsewhere, heirlooms appear as recurring motifs. Long present within Gibney’s practice, these objects become vessels for the intangible things inherited between generations: memory, stories, trauma and history. Their apparent preciousness is complicated by their vulnerability. They tarnish, gather dust, acquire scratches and move from one set of hands to another, accumulating traces of the lives and events that surround them.
Gibney gathers his source imagery from an equally fragmented archive: his own photography, online auctions, old film stills, instructional manuals and historical archives. His process becomes one of excavation, interested in the moment of association when an image or object is stripped of its context and unexpectedly leads somewhere else entirely: to a person, a place, a feeling or a memory you may or may not have intended to revisit.
There is a fitting circularity to Gibney presenting this body of work at Oigåll. Before the gallery existed, before the building had a program or even a clear idea of what it might become, Billy was the first artist to place a work inside it.
Years later, he returns with an exhibition about what remains, what changes, and what we find when we return to something we thought we remembered.