Beatrice Gibson

Gregory Treverton, the director of RAND Center for Global Risk and Security, once distinguished between puzzles and mysteries—puzzles being made out of pieces of fact while mysteries are dependent on judgments and assessments of uncertainty. Two pieces make up the exhibition “Beatrice Gibson: The Tiger’s Mind, featuring Jesse Ash”; one is a puzzle and the other a mystery.

While artist Jesse Ash’s solo work is featured, and he’s involved in Gibson’s piece, it is her show, inasmuch as she is the instigator. Ash’s piece consists of scaled-down renditions of backdrops for political speeches (such as Obama’s 2008 Democratic Convention stage) in wood and semitransparent paper, arranged on a platform to form a sculptural installation that doubles as a backdrop on its own. In front of it, Ash orchestrates scenes in which two actors read a script: part of his Avoidance—Avoidance (A Project of Transparency), a project running from 2012 through 2014 that draws inspiration from Dada, Mary Ellen Bute’s 1936 film for Universal Newsreel. As references and elements converge, the work’s internal logic makes each ingredient fit neatly together, concluding with a complex image centered on speech and objects.

The other, more tantalizing piece is a film, The Tiger’s Mind, by Gibson, featuring six characters: Tiger, Mind, Tree, Wind, Circle and a woman named Amy, which respectively represent the filmic components set, music, sounds, special effects, director, and narration. Moreover, these six elements have been devised by six contributors; Céline Condorelli the set, John Tilbury the music, Alex Waterman the sound, Jesse Ash the special effects, Beatrice Gibson direction, and Will Holder narration. The film is based on Cornelius Cardew’s 1967 musical score “The Tiger’s Mind” and its efforts to generate speech as well as to serve as music-producing text. Gibson’s cinematic work, which bears in mind the relationships the original score outlines between performers, in many ways seems to be a conceptual puzzle whose pieces, as conceived by different contributors, interconnect to form an overall picture. But its meandering sequence of images brings to mind the Kuleshov Effect—whereby juxtapositions of edited footage affect viewers’ interpretations of different scenes—and consequently the uncertainty of finding meaning in single images, let alone any sort of verity in several sequential ones. Furthermore, the narrator reiterates, “This is what happened,” without ever offering any real conclusion. And as we are introduced to a gun, a murder, a culprit, and a victim, it becomes clear that the film is a complete mystery, both as a thrilleresque movie and an emotive work of art.