ARTIST STATEMENT
This work is from an ongoing series that began as a way to keep creating in a world that felt increasingly loud, judgmental, and obsessed with telling women who they should be. When I started making my work, I was holding onto something simple and essential—my own joy. The masks offered me freedom: freedom from age expectations, beauty rules, and the quiet erasures society offers women when visibility becomes conditional. They let me play again, and from that play, deeper meanings began to surface.
In Kitsch Almighty, I build a surreal scene rooted in Southern domestic culture, layered with the everyday symbols we’re taught to treat with reverence—religious statues, kitchen tools, porches, family roles. The figures, dressed in vintage clothing and wearing animal heads, inhabit these spaces with a mix of elegance, irreverence, humor, and defiance. Some work speaks directly to inherited expectations placed on women—marriage, motherhood, propriety—while others lean into the sheer absurdity of the rules we’re expected to follow. The work isn’t about gender identity so much as it is about the cultural pressure to fit into any identity too tightly. By leaning into the surreal, the playful, and the “wrong”, these images push back against the seriousness and rigidity that try to steal our joy. Together, these pieces reclaim humor, autonomy, and the permission to exist on our own terms.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Libby Gamble is a photographer and mixed-media artist based in South Carolina. Her work blends environmental portraiture, surrealist staging, and Southern cultural motifs to explore identity, expectation, and the complex emotional terrain of contemporary womanhood. Gamble holds an MFA in photography from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, where her work was included in the university’s Spring Show honoring standout student work. Her images have been exhibited in California, North Carolina, and South Carolina, including ArtFields 2015, and her work was recognized by the Columbia Museum of Art when she was named South Carolina Artist of the Year in 2013. Gamble has also curated exhibitions, including a large-scale group photography show with the Asheville Area Arts Council, which brought together multiple regional artists for a highly attended community event. Across her practice, Gamble draws on both traditional and alternative photographic processes. She has studied at Penland School of Craft on a full scholarship and continues to work with film, hand-finished surfaces, and mixed-media presentation techniques. Her recent work focuses on surreal domestic narratives that use masks, props, and vintage costuming to question learned roles and inherited cultural scripts. After a year of profound personal transition following Hurricane Helene, Gamble has returned to her studio practice with renewed clarity and direction. She is currently developing an ongoing body of work rooted in modern Southern mythology, exploring the ways humor, absurdity, and autonomy can coexist within—and rebel against—familiar cultural landscapes.
© Libby Gamble