Trinities
Cohen Gallery, Brown University
November 4-December 19, 2021

Curator Kate Kraczon:

Jules Gimbrone’s immersive installations dissolve visual and aural binaries. Objects both sculptural and sonic reverberate across the space of the gallery, blending and bending light and sound into washes of color, tone, and tempo. Meticulously calibrated by the artist, these structures are intentionally scored to produce physical sensations that migrate—unfixed—across the senses. 

Gimbrone has written extensively on what they term trans-sensing:

“methods that trans people—specifically those who identify as transgender, but also people whose subjectivity is unmoored from the dominant culture—intuitively cultivate to navigate the world. An emphasis on sensory presence and integration, such as trans, is a reprioritization of the nuanced body, the flexible body, the imagined body, and the listening body, one that is able to perceive information beyond a quick binary-based flattening.” – Gimbrone, Walker Reader, 2019

By resisting an either/or model of artistic expression, Gimbrone’s practice locates itself within a hybrid space that reflects their refusal of either/or gender. Their investigation of tempo as a kind of binary—the pulsing metronomic beat within Trinities—emerged within the pandemic as time transformed, stretched and stunted, over the many weeks and months spent indoors and isolated. Gimbrone expands tempo beyond its role as a form of measurement in music to embrace temporalities outside the scope of human perception, to geological and even religious—sublime—forms of time.

This both/and strategy can be found throughout the exhibition. The mechanics of sound—vibration, soundwave, receptor—are represented in a wall-mounted triptych hologram; hand snapping, rippling waves, and a microphone are transmuted into a kind of “holy trinity,” playfully recalled from the artist’s Catholic childhood. Here Gimbrone recuperates and queers this element of an otherwise oppressive dogma. The father, son, and holy spirit as the same but different, a metaphor of sound and bodies freed of binary.