Jules Gimbrone
March 2022

Jules Gimbrone is invested in the ways that an unstable subjectivity engages with social and internalized, cognitive technologies. The work synthesizes physical and sonic material, sensory perception, the physical body, electronics, and objects.

As both a visual and sonic artist, Gimbrone works in a third space to produce synesthetic, hybrid content. They developed a rubric that they call Trans-Sensing. Trans Sensing Modalities are methods that trans people-specifically those who identify as transgender, but also people whose subjectivity is unmoored or unrecognizable to the dominant culture-intuitively cultivate to navigate the world. An emphasis on sensory presence and integration is part of the trans experience in explicit and nuanced ways, and in their work they evoke these unstable states of being.

Building on this is an expansive idea of the phenomenology of resonance-social performativity, identity development, subject/object relationships, etc.-all being inherent to the accumulation of layers that are built on materially transparent, fragile, surfaces. Resonance, as a set of conditions or relationships between things, becomes activated and legible through light and sound then complicated through abstraction and perceptual manipulations.

Gimbrone arranges translucent, bisected, reflective, liquid, and entropic material into ensembles like a resonating stage or a duet between glass vessels. Each object is studded with transducers that convert audio recordings of the material into vibrations directed back into their sources. The transduction of sound in turn transduces the function of the surface material. Rather than demarcating the boundaries of autonomous objects, they indicate relationships that are pervious, manifold, and in flux. Visually and audibly affected by the sonic transfer, the ensembles become listening bodies that rattle, shatter, ripple, bloom, and evaporate. Their process is like gardening. Probing surfaces like a topographer, they cultivate some resonances and maintain some visual definitions. Other elements are left to slowly rot or ripen. The resultant musical composition is thus a catalyst for material decomposition through which each ensemble performs itself anew. And as with the formation of subjectivity, natural processes and cultural techniques overlap in ways both harmonious and discordant.

Over the last ten years Gimbrone's work has appeared internationally in a variety of venues including museums such as the Walker Art Center, SculptureCenter, MOMA PS1, The Rubin Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park; interdisciplinary spaces such as Pioneer Works, Monkey Town, Judson Church, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Human Resources LA, LAXART Los Angeles; music venues such as REDCAT, ISSUE Project Room, and Spectrum; galleries such as Stellar Projects, Park View Gallery, Vox Populi, Bodega Gallery, Helena Anrather, City Limits Gallery, and Melanie Flood Projects; and theaters such as the Théâtre de l'Usine. Last year they were awarded the Rema Hort Mann prize and was included in In Practice at SculptureCenter. in 2022, Gimbrone will have work included in the upcoming exhibition LIFES at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.


https://julesgimbrone.com/