Logan Sibrel makes paintings, drawings, zines, and music about memory, boredom, and fandom.

Working with figures from pop culture, he paints the darker aspects of nostalgia–unchecked obsession, transferred narcissism, and a self-effacing desire to inhabit a world outside one’s own. The finished works are a tease. They have the makings of a narrative–faces familiar from 90’s pop culture, Pasolini films, and country music that tell us nothing about their context; stills from gay porn; lines of oblique dialogue–but the artist is really more interested in elision, with having the authority to decide what not to include. He plays around with invented autobiography and posturing. The lines written in his zines and throughout his paintings are full of half truths. They read like false diary entries that remain tantalizing despite the reader’s knowledge that they’re mostly invented. Sibrel speaks frequently about what he considers the “compulsive reveal” in his work (I think of a teenage boy positively bursting with emotions that couldn’t possibly have been felt this deeply, ever). That stuff is certainly present, specifically in the artist’s generous and empathetic treatment of sentimentality and maudlin youth. But what I see as a major force in the work is less the compulsive reveal and more Sibrel’s masterful use of concealment. By carefully arbitrating what a viewer sees while including traces of the information being omitted, he engineers the kind of nagging curiosity that keeps the National Enquirer in circulation. The artist uses deceptively shallow means to confront the unsteady and fragmented nature of identity.

-Danielle Orchard

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