Gish Gallop Reverie

Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam

Gish Gallop Reverie

Studio A65, Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam

Gish Gallop Reverie, 2025

Site-specific mural, laser-printed paper, wheat-paste

Selftitled Soapboxes, 2025

Eleven soapboxes, oak, acrylic,variable dimension.

Soapbox Reading, 2025

Daily reading performances.

Gish Gallop Reverie, 2025

Publication 1:1 Mural, collected monologues

The Gish Gallop is a rhetorical technique that floods an opponent with excessive arguments, regardless of their merit. The soapbox, once a wooden crate for transporting goods, became a makeshift stage for public speech. Through the figure of the troubadour, Gish Gallop Reverie weaves together soapbox speeches, satirical labor ballads, and themes of love, chivalry, and unrequited devotion, scattered across fragmented narratives that blur the line between folklore and folk-fact. The mural, made of printed A4 sheets wheatpasted onto the wall, reveals faint figures across a panoramic field: tangled relationships and shifting interpretations, a comprehensive political cartoon, a medieval morality diagram, receding and appearing from the dark digital raster. 

The installation consists of a site-specific mural in my studio at Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, composed of two hundred fifty-five laser-printed A4 sheets of a pixel drawing applied with wheatpaste (480 × 342 cm).

Eleven oak soapboxes, variable dimensions, acrylic painted in period woodblock printing font: Lovingly, glistening, glimpse, unconditional, ravishing, husk, lingering, languish, perpetual, quiver, pinched.

Daily reading performances during Rijksakademie open studios, May 20 to 25, 2025, variations of monologues and songs from the accompanying publication. Meanwhile, stepping between a series of soap-boxes that in turn recite a perpetual bottomless love poem continuous and in no particular order.

A publication accompanies the work: Gish Gallop Reverie – 1:1 Mural & Collected mononlogues, printed and bound in collaboration with Anton Westbom Weflö, designed by Anton Westbom Weflö.

Gish Gallop Reverie

Designed by Anton Westbom Weflö