Matthew Gilbert: Pick-up trucks, no pink carnations

Contributed by Bill Arning / Plunked in the middle of Matthew Gilbert’s solo exhibition “Pretend Till It Hurts” at Jane St. Art is a five-foot-tall steel construction crane buckling under the weight of a rented bouncy castle. Titled Until the Whole City Falls Over, the sculpture turns an ordinary suburban party rental into something strangely unsettling. Inflatable castles felt perfectly natural at children’s birthdays until Gilbert reminded us what castles actually are: military edifices built to withstand siege and slaughter. Today’s children absorb endless streams of AI-generated fantasy violence through games and television. Gilbert suggests these fey worlds were never innocent. Revealing – and reveling in – the darker subconscious beneath cheerful iconography is one of his great strengths. A compulsive storyteller, Gilbert moves effortlessly among sculpture, tapestry, installation, and theatrical set design. He is trained in theater and film and treats medium as incidental to narrative. His works spill across categories with infectious inventiveness, creating an immersive fictional universe rather than a collection of discrete objects. 

From the gallery entrance nearly the entire exhibition is visible, inviting viewers to begin knitting its elements into a larger mythology. Gilbert belongs to a generation of artists for whom the visual languages of theater, gaming, craft, and sculpture are no longer separate. He delights in collapsing distinctions between real and simulated materials. Forged steel sits beside meticulously fabricated faux foam; monumental structures coexist with lightweight illusions. The uncertainty extends to scale, with monumental structures giving way to portable scenes. A glowing tabletop Public Toilet #2 becomes a strangely sacred throne, while It Started Last Night depicts a barn dissolving into a dreamlike landscape where cartoon logic overrides physical law. That logic governs the entire exhibition. Church steeples impale pickup trucks, farm buildings sag like exhausted animals, and shadows detach themselves from their sources. 

Gilbert’s wall pieces are equally deceptive. Made with punch embroidery – a textile process he employs for drawing, using loops of thread instead of ink – they initially resemble charming early video game landscapes. But catastrophe quickly intrudes. In Flat Parts of Their Buzzcuts, a tornado tears through the turbine arms of a wind farm while volcanoes erupt in the distance. A shattered billboard still legibly declares, “God Won’t Save You.” In Load Bearing, a trompe l’oeil wall appears to collapse onto a faux-steel spike, while nearby, in Soon Enough, a medieval turret writhes like a snake. Cinching the turret is kinky metal ring with a white heraldic banner erupting from its top – a visual gag whose adolescent phallic humor sits comfortably with the exhibition’s darker currents. Similarly, as a native New Yorker who only began driving regularly for artists’ residencies in Nebraska and Maine, he still approaches pick-up trucks with the fascination of a youthful outsider. Appreciative of their aura of performative butchness, he makes them recurring characters in his fictional America, populated largely by abandoned buildings and absent people.

Gilbert has expanded his practice by drawing with white thread on black fabric in a trio of works whose similarities suggest successive film stills. Scared of the Rain by God serves as the exterior establishing shot: a collapsing Victorian house, a full moon, and a single falling leaf. In the final work we are inside the house, watching water drop from a baroque spigot. Gilbert leaves the narrative ambiguous, allowing viewers to supply their own story between the frames. Human figures appear in his work only as ghosts. In Borrowed Grief, a translucent self-portrait confronts an abandoned church, a stripped pick-up, and two dead trees, separated by the same steel fence that materializes elsewhere as sculpture. That oscillation between image and object culminates in Second and Grand, in which a real burning candle reappears as a projected illusion within a theatrical installation. After spending time in Gilbert’s darkly funny universe, you start to suspect your own shadow might drive home alone, dodging funnel clouds and volcanoes all the way.

“Matthew Gilbert: Pretend Till It Hurts,” Jane St. Art, 11 Jane Street, Suite A, Saugerties, NY. Through August 1, 2026.

About the author: Bill Arning is a curator, critic, advisor, writer, and itinerant maker of pop-up shows based in Old Chatham, New York.