Jeffrey Gibson
Made in 2015, The Time The Stars Fell From The Sky is one of Gibson's most commanding wall-based works, and among the earliest to fully realize the flat beaded panel format he would develop alongside his figurative sculptures. The title draws from Lakota oral tradition; the Leonid meteor storm of 1833, which witnesses described as stars falling like snow, an event of such magnitude it became a fixed point in the Indigenous calendar known as the Winter Counts. That sense of a cosmic rupture recorded in communal memory runs through the surface of the work: a symmetrical chevron field drawn from Choctaw textile traditions frames a central figural form in dense red, the whole bordered by rows of brass studs and fringed with copper cones whose jingle is as much a part of the piece as the beads themselves. The work synthesizes Gibson's dual inheritances; the geometric abstraction of Minimalism and the ceremonial visual language of Native American craft; into something that belongs fully to neither and exceeds both.
Provenance
Marc Straus Gallery, New York.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.