Jeff Gillette: An OC Artist Playfully Exploring Our Urban Blight

06 Apr Jeff Gillette: An OC Artist Playfully Exploring Our Urban Blight

While baby boomers are the first generation raised with television as a major life influence, Jeff Gillette surpasses most of his contemporaries with his fascination for TV images, particularly for animated characters. The Costa Mesa-based artist recalls his earliest major artistic influence to us in an interview, “I grew up in Michigan in the 1960s through ‘80s, often watching The Wonderful World of Disney, and I loved the shows, especially the cartoons.” 

Yet when Gillette first visited Disneyland in 1978 in his teens, he hated the experience and left after only 30 minutes. This impression changed his vision of the cartoon characters he thought he enjoyed, as he later began illustrating Mickey Mouse and friends in dark, dismal settings. These surreal depictions eventually propelled him to fame as an artist.

Soon after visiting Disneyland, Gillette planned to attend art school. But he says, “My parents who grew up during the Great Depression acted like they were poor their whole lives. Art school was out of the question, so I settled for a junior college, receiving a two-year degree in commercial illustration. I ended up at a print shop as a plate preparer, and although I used my creativity for finding shortcuts in this job, this work had nothing to do with art.” 

He went back to school, this time to become certified as an English Teacher at Michigan’s Oakland University. After receiving his degree in 1985, he followed his wanderlust and traveled to Nepal, India, Europe and South America. “Seeing the slums in Calcutta, Lima and Rio de Janeiro initiated my fascination with third-world slums,” he says. Gillette’s interest in slums later became the genesis for his series, “Slumscapes,” which he began creating in 1992, and has exhibited in several venues over the years.

“My most modest and first goal is to fuse my love for world travel . . . with my art endeavors.”

Gillette subsequently traveled to California to land a teaching gig, but he received no offers. So he volunteered for the Peace Corps and spent 1987 to ‘89 teaching English in Nepal, often exploring the slums of India and Bangladesh. When he returned home, he was disillusioned with teaching English, and decided to finally pursue his dream to teach art. He enrolled at Wayne State University in Detroit, working toward an Art Teaching Credential. Afterwards, he returned to California, and was offered a one-year art teaching position at Foothill High School in Tustin. That one year turned into 28 years. “I feel blessed that this long-shot, unlikely position worked out for me at such a great school,” he says.

From 1994 to 2001, while teaching art, Gillette worked on his MFA in drawing, painting and printmaking at Cal State Fullerton. During that time, he began creating unsolicited Pop-Up shows for Santa Ana’s Art Walks. “I continued to show up with a shopping cart full of my collages, or with a mini-gallery displaying my early Slumscape artworks,” he says. “I later rented out empty storefronts and staged my first shows of paintings, irreverent collages, videos and installations.” 

His MFA show, “Architecture and Fertility,” in 2001 included 300-plus small hand-sewn dolls of multi-ethnic colored fabric; viewers had to walk on the fabric to see his Slumscape themed art. For his subsequent exhibition, “I’ve Accepted Jesus Christ as My Personal Savior – But Still Feel Crappy,” he created 400 Christian-themed irreverent collages. 

In graduate school in 1996, Gillette met Laurie Hassold, who was working on her MFA in sculpture. “We had an instant, overwhelming attraction. It was almost like recognizing someone you’ve actually never known,” he says. “Our common taste in atypical music was also uncanny, and she was a graduate from the high school where I was teaching.”

Hassold chimed in about their artistic connection as their starting point in love and life, “As art was our main connection, we began collaborating right from the start. I was asked to do a solo show at Meta Gallery in downtown Santa Ana, and saw the opportunity to collaborate [with him]. Our show ‘Mutual Submission’ revolved around the physical, psychological and political nature of male/female relationships, and the not-so-delicate balance among cooperation, ego and differing artistic processes. Much of the work was close-up videos of our physical interactions,” she said.

They later moved in together. Gillette introduced Hassold to third-world travel “on-the-cheap,” taking her to Kenya to do Safaris and to beaches. “Although it was one of our favorite trips,” he explains, “there was lots of strife, including a break up as the lights went out on the island we were staying at, getting stranded in the middle of Masai Mara Game Preserve, and having to hitch-hike back to Nairobi. We married in 2001 and have continued traveling extensively.”

As Gillette and Hassold continue to make art from their home-based studios, they see common themes in their work. In particular, they both suffer from “horror vaccui.” This term from medieval manuscript illumination, describes books encrusted with every form of decoration to the exclusion of negative space. 

However, they have different approaches to the creative process. Hassold — who teaches sculpture and three-dimensional design at Orange Coast College and Irvine Valley College — explains: “I love to brainstorm over ideas and prefer conceptual, thematic discussions. I start with inspiration, research and development, planning, and then go to production. Jeff however wants quick mechanical, formal input.” 

Hassold’s highly detailed hand-wrought sculptures are rooted in her fascination with fossils, skeletal remains, and her lifetime romance with science fiction and fairy tales. She is interested in the aftermath, a place that makes her feel warm and cozy, where there are no humans, where the surviving plants and animals proliferate and evolve on their own terms without our toxic influence. 

Gillette is interested in, as he explains, “the precipice just before the denouement and fall of humanity as we achieve our penultimate worst.” This vision has inspired him to create his Slumscape paintings and assemblage sculptures of Disney characters, sometimes with tattered clothes and features, often residing in the world’s worst slums. His work has evolved from illustrations of frightened Mickeys and Minnies, to Disney buildings, such as the original Disneyland castle, oftentimes in disrepair or in ruins. He originated the title “Dismayland” in 2010 for an exhibition of post-apocalyptic landscapes at Greg Escalante’s Copro Gallery in Santa Monica.

Gillette has also exhibited Slumscape and Dismayland artworks at Bert Green Fine Art, Chicago, Gregorio Escalante Gallery, L.A. and Laguna Art Museum, where his “Slum” exhibition featured decrepit, weathered structures, some with real estate signs, others with Disney characters peering out.

In 2015, he received a message from the manager of the English street artist Banksy, requesting six “Dismayland” paintings for an exhibition in England. Soon after, Banksy invited Jeff and Laurie to help install his “Dismaland” (different spelling than Gillette’s) subversive bemusement park in the English countryside. Upon returning home, Gillette began creating his own paintings based on Banksy’s Dismaland.

Gillette’s subsequent work includes exhibiting: Dismayland Norde with a Castle Façade in Nuart Gallery, Norway; Slum Rehabilitation Authority, street art project on slum walls in Mumbai, India; and Dhisneyland [sic] Castle façade, also in the Mumbai slums. Sitting in his home during the Covid-19 pandemic, he ruminates about his murals in India. He remarks, “With the lockdown happening there, my Slumscape paintings of urban blight without people around the outside of them is now a realistic view!” 

“My most modest and first goal,” he adds, “is to fuse my love for world travel, especially to India, with my art endeavors. I have been doing this in some capacity almost every year since my Peace Corps service. My more significant goals are to expand my present success of showing in art galleries, art fairs, online and hopefully in even more museums.”

Jeff Gillette and Laurie Hassold are slated to be in “Terra Incognita” at OCCCA June 6- 27, 2020. Exhibition dates are subject to change. Visit occca.org for more info.