Jeff Gillette invites you to trash his artworks \u2014 to step on them, kick them, wade through the hundreds of drawings and prints littering the floor of Gregorio Escalante Gallery in L.A.\u2019s Chinatown. This is where Gillette\u2019s solo show \u201cTotal Dismay\u201d opened on Saturday. It\u2019s where the artist has created what he calls \u201can art landfill.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gillette \u2014 who was among those featured in British street artist\u00a0Banksy\u2019s month-long 2015 installation \u201cDismaland,\u201d a dystopian amusement park in Somerset, England \u2014 brings that same sardonic tone to his solo show. More than 200 works include large-scale paintings, ink drawings, sculptures and shadow box works.<\/p>\n
Disney imagery prevails. The art on the floor, which visitors must walk over when perusing works on the gallery walls, was created by Gillette and his students at Tustin\u2019s Foothill High School, where he teaches, during the last year. The concrete floor is blanketed with hundreds of variations on Mickey Mouse, ink-drawn, pencil-sketched, finger-painted, collaged. While Gillette\u2019s pieces on the gallery\u2019s walls are priced into the thousands of dollars, the paper works on the floor are $5 apiece. That they\u2019re strewn on the ground and presented as trash is the point, he says. Gillette is juxtaposing art and garbage to make a statement about the subjective nature of the art market.<\/p>\n
\u201cWho sets the value on art? It\u2019s pretty arbitrary,\u201d Gillette says. \u201cI\u2019m a little cynical on who dictates that. It has nothing to do with the artist or the art, I think, especially when you get into the blue chip stuff. It\u2019s more to do with commerce and people flipping art and making money. I\u2019m working on the far bottom end of that spectrum. Is it garbage or art? You decide.\u201d<\/p>\n
Over the last year, Gillette has traveled to residential slums in Mumbai, India, for what he calls \u201cart interventions.\u201d He was a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal in the late 1980s and has visited India more than 20 times in the last three decades, so the area is close to his heart. A fine artist who\u2019s also experimented with political street art, Gillette paints peppy Disney imagery on the walls surrounding these ramshackle shanty towns, vast landfills and outdoor toilets. He photographs the scene where his public art hangs, then he paints photo-realistic versions, adorning the canvases with sculpted latex to give the oil and acrylic works a three-dimensional quality.<\/p>\n
The idea, he says, is to turn a spotlight on the poverty and suffering that some people might otherwise ignore. \u201cI always use Disney, the supposed happiest place on Earth, with what I would consider the heaviest place on Earth,\u201d he says. \u201cThere\u2019s realism, and then there\u2019s \u2018too-realism\u2019 \u2014 my work \u2014 it\u2019s too realistic, stuff that people don\u2019t really want to look at.\u201d<\/p>\n