Drawing for Dezmond Gipson started as a necessity — well, for a kid, who wanted to trade Dragon Ball Z cards with his fellow gamers growing up in the early 2000s in Memphis. He grew up gaming and embraced technology; he even modified computers with his stepdad and brother. Yet rather than printing out pictures of the characters, he realized he could draw his own, and he was quite good. “It was an economy,” he says, yet it ignited a creativity in him to eventually become, as he now refers to himself, a “Digital Generalist.”
Today, Gipson works as a video editor for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, his full-time job tapping into that economical side of art that brought him to his passion, but as this Digital Generalist, he seeks to be a “jack of all trades,” an appreciator of visual and digital media beyond its commercial value. In that sense, his first solo show, “Generally Digital,” which closed on October 10th at Christian Brothers University’s Beverly & Sam Ross Gallery, was a kaleidoscopic window into the artist’s interests, with videos bouncing from a hype-up for Memphis to a Pokemon fan edit. “It’s where the commercial meets the creative,” Gipson says.
What follows is a Q&A with the artist, edited for clarity and length.
Memphis Flyer: Considering that you refer to yourself as a Digital Generalist and titled your show “Generally Digital,” what made you want to pursue “everything” — animation, graphic design, filmmaking, photography, etc.?
Dezmond Gipson: I like that question because it was hard at first. I guess everybody told me not to. That’s kind of why it was kind of important to me.
I [went to Memphis College of Art] for 2D animation, and a part of that is required to take a 3D course. And so when I took that course, I had too much fun. I was exposed to something new and I just couldn’t let it go. … And I think that 3D became my bread and butter in that process.
Do you still feel that kind of excitement when you’re working on art?
I think early on when I became a digital artist from that switch to paper to the pixel, so much of it I had to learn while I was working on it. I felt like that was a part of making art is to learn more while you work on this because that’s how I did it for so long because every time I came across something I wanted to do, it was ‘figure out how to do it.’
And so that part of the creative process, you know which isn’t necessarily part of the creative process, is a part of mine, where I’m always pushing my technical knowledge alongside whatever creative endeavor I was going with.
With so much of work being focused on the commercial, how do you balance your professional work with your personal work?
It’s been hard. Usually things come in waves. I try my best to ride waves when I get them. Like the Pokemon video [featured various characters from the franchise], once I started — I wasn’t doing anything before I started on that — but when I started on that, that’s all I was doing. I was playing a lot of Pokemon, the video game competitively all year, and the only time I took a break from playing it was when I made that video because it took all of my time and I was really trying to get it out before Pokemon World happened, which was the big Pokemon video game competition.
What do you hope that people get from seeing your work or your show?
I want people to see someone who is making work for other people, someone who does have a fulltime job [but does have a gallery show]. When I was in school, I felt like this, butI felt like I was trading my freedom of expression for a full-time salary. So that’s one thing that I really feel like I really want people, is really just to see me have both.
And also, with the aspect of being a jack of all trades, I really want people to know that when it comes to getting work out here as a digital artist there is a place for you.
Especially now with the rise of AI, seeing the artist behind the work, I’m sure, is worthwhile.
One thing about art is presentation. Just putting it in the space of a gallery, it gives it a presentation that doesn’t exist when you’re just scrolling. Some of this stuff is vertical because it was meant to be viewed on the phone, but it is given a whole new life in the gallery.
Like in [one video in the gallery show, featuring clips from a New York a family trip], the titles of each video, I have a video file name on there, and if you read those in succession, it kind of creates a poem. I felt like in the art gallery there’s a way more way better chance of someone reading that. Like, do any of my friends read those when they scroll by the post when I posted it after my vacation? I doubt it.
