All is full of love (2005)
‘Student looking for women to interview about marriage. I’m looking for women of any marital status i.e. from those who are thinking about getting married, to newly-weds, long-term married, widowed or divorced. Call Sandy to discuss…’
So read an advertisement placed in the Dominion Post during 2004 by artist Sandy Gibbs. The DVD work Gloria features one of the several women who responded. What is, or should be, private about relationships? What do we tell others about ourselves? In an age of Oprah-style revelations, we know both more and less about each other than ever.
Filmed at home wearing her wedding dress, Gibbs recorded Gloria talking frankly about her long marriage to husband Doug and their family of now grown-up daughters. Gibbs describes her motivation for the interviews as ‘an investigation into the reality of the tenuous/elusive promise of happiness’. However personal this work may be, Gibbs’ quick-fire edit of this interview drains away much of the most intimate content, leaving us with teasing and fragmented glimpses of Gloria’s life.’
Emma Bugden
How to be a friend: New Wellington artists
City Gallery, Wellington
10 December 2005 – 29 January 2006
‘… Sandy Gibbs’ DVD [All is full of love] is a smart take on the imperfections of the portrait and performance. It’s the standout work for me, a completely disarming dual-screen manipulation of an interview with a woman in her old wedding dress about her long marriage. It focuses in its quick emotive cuts on the grimacing artifice and uncomfortableness of the filming process, to the point where in the little we find out fact and fiction collapse disturbingly into one another.’