Nobody's Nothing

The escalating interestingness that is Nashville continues tonight with Julie Lee's new CD release party at the Station Inn, but before making your way over there, you are advised to appear at the Twist art gallery to receive the witness of Cary Gibson in the form of NOBODY'S NOTHING which opens tonight and remains on display till the end of the month. I now hand the mic to Cary (or her artist's statement):

Art is an invitation to see, in a world in which we are so often invited, asked, or made not to see. We are told, and we often believe, that not seeing is vital to our own comfort, identity, and freedom. This work asks if this is true.

The installation emerged from, and reflects, my unease as someone for whom others are detained. The word “detention” is about restraint, but the fact of detention is also about removing people and their circumstances even from view so that they do not detain us. The installation seeks to respond to a particular kind of indefinite detention, but the invisible and forgotten are also in our midst, isolated by their lack of place in our imaginations.

The title of this work refers to a line from Morrisey’s 1994 track, “Lifeguard Sleeping, Girl Drowning”:

Please don’t worry
There’ll be no fuss
She was nobody’s nothing.

Standing alone as a sentence, the two words of the title also express a haunted statement of faith. The work’s provocation is the fact of human dignity.