21.3.14 - 22.6.14
Lorna Simpson, Baltic CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART
GATESHEAD
BY ZARA WORTH
Long overdue, Lorna Simpson’s first major solo show in Europe dominates two floors at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. After rising to prominence in the 1980’s with her deft combinations of photography and text, most notably Waterbearer (1986), Simpson has gained an international reputation for her complex conceptual artworks.
Simpson has intelligently exploited the novelty of a mid-career retrospective; a rare opportunity to readdress and reconsider individual artworks within the wider context of her own practice. Therefore, the exhibition does not follow a traditional chronological order. Instead, just as her combinations of text and image induce intricate associative relationships, the curation of the work makes tangible various threads throughout her work. The collection of pieces on third floor are by large devoted to challenging ideas surround identity and representation. Whilst the fourth floor gallery space focuses on works dealing with memory, and boasts some of Simpson’s most recent works. However, despite this splitting of the show between storeys, the association game goes on, all works invisibly interconnected via a complex ideological web.
The third floor gallery, containing some of the oldest pieces, including a piece made whilst on her MFA in California, asserts the key themes found within Simpson’s practice: gender, identity, culture, history and memory. The impact of Simpson’s work owes its thanks to her capacity to create seemingly simple images, apparently open for interpretation, but in fact elaborate strategies, provoking an analysis of our of own thought processes.
Simpson’s success lies in her ability to deal with uncomfortable subjects in a direct but non-confrontational manner. The title of the earliest work in the show, Gestures/Reenactments (1985), made for her Masters Degree Show, provides an anchor point, mooring the surrounding works. After abandoning street photography in search of something with more analytical power, Simpson began staging her photographs, often working with performance artists and hired actors. Through this ‘act’ for the camera, an interesting connection to her influential tutors in California, simple postures and gestures are drawn out to the viewer and activated by short bursts of text below. Out of context, the individual identity of the figure obscured either by cropping the head out of shot, or due to the figure facing away, all attention is focused on the figure; their gender and their ethnicity. These Jane and John Does do not lack identity completely, instead they embody a collective identity and experience. Their accompanying narratives are ambiguous enough to not be excluding and direct enough to critique specific imbalances in society.
The vastness of the Fourth Floor gallery is pronounced by the positioning of two large projection screens on which Momentum (2011) plays. With the screens set slightly further towards the back of the gallery space it is noticeable how people tend to shirk away from the arena before the screens and try and watch from the sides or even behind. Their reluctance to stand in such an exposed position before the screens mirrors sentiment the personal memory which Simpson returns to in the work. The film watches an endless and mesmerising group of black male and female ballet dancers pirouette, the projections not completely in-sync, the sensation of disjointed memory is exaggerated as the images jump. Through the piece Simpson recalls her first (and last) ballet recital; dressed top to toe in gold she remembers stepping out on stages and instantly realising she would much rather be in the audience. For a long time Simpson has stayed behind the camera, collaborating with individuals who perform for her. Yet in more recent works such as 1957-2009 (2009) and Chess (2013) Simpson steps in front of the camera. However, unlike during her traumatic ballet experience, she is not here as Lorna, instead she is in character. Playing a part for the camera, exploring the flexibility of identity and even gender.
Of course so many works with such ambiguous meanings can be frustrating for an audience who want to pin down works with more than just subjective conjecture. However, this ambiguity itself lends itself to the nature of many of her contentious subject matters: thankfully unfixed. In the on-going shape-shifting of characters, allusions to embedded stereotypes and superstitions, and misleading memories, there is the promise of antithesis.
Zara Worth is an artist and writer based in the North East. To find out more please visit her website: www.zaraworth.com
Simpson has intelligently exploited the novelty of a mid-career retrospective; a rare opportunity to readdress and reconsider individual artworks within the wider context of her own practice. Therefore, the exhibition does not follow a traditional chronological order. Instead, just as her combinations of text and image induce intricate associative relationships, the curation of the work makes tangible various threads throughout her work. The collection of pieces on third floor are by large devoted to challenging ideas surround identity and representation. Whilst the fourth floor gallery space focuses on works dealing with memory, and boasts some of Simpson’s most recent works. However, despite this splitting of the show between storeys, the association game goes on, all works invisibly interconnected via a complex ideological web.
The third floor gallery, containing some of the oldest pieces, including a piece made whilst on her MFA in California, asserts the key themes found within Simpson’s practice: gender, identity, culture, history and memory. The impact of Simpson’s work owes its thanks to her capacity to create seemingly simple images, apparently open for interpretation, but in fact elaborate strategies, provoking an analysis of our of own thought processes.
Simpson’s success lies in her ability to deal with uncomfortable subjects in a direct but non-confrontational manner. The title of the earliest work in the show, Gestures/Reenactments (1985), made for her Masters Degree Show, provides an anchor point, mooring the surrounding works. After abandoning street photography in search of something with more analytical power, Simpson began staging her photographs, often working with performance artists and hired actors. Through this ‘act’ for the camera, an interesting connection to her influential tutors in California, simple postures and gestures are drawn out to the viewer and activated by short bursts of text below. Out of context, the individual identity of the figure obscured either by cropping the head out of shot, or due to the figure facing away, all attention is focused on the figure; their gender and their ethnicity. These Jane and John Does do not lack identity completely, instead they embody a collective identity and experience. Their accompanying narratives are ambiguous enough to not be excluding and direct enough to critique specific imbalances in society.
The vastness of the Fourth Floor gallery is pronounced by the positioning of two large projection screens on which Momentum (2011) plays. With the screens set slightly further towards the back of the gallery space it is noticeable how people tend to shirk away from the arena before the screens and try and watch from the sides or even behind. Their reluctance to stand in such an exposed position before the screens mirrors sentiment the personal memory which Simpson returns to in the work. The film watches an endless and mesmerising group of black male and female ballet dancers pirouette, the projections not completely in-sync, the sensation of disjointed memory is exaggerated as the images jump. Through the piece Simpson recalls her first (and last) ballet recital; dressed top to toe in gold she remembers stepping out on stages and instantly realising she would much rather be in the audience. For a long time Simpson has stayed behind the camera, collaborating with individuals who perform for her. Yet in more recent works such as 1957-2009 (2009) and Chess (2013) Simpson steps in front of the camera. However, unlike during her traumatic ballet experience, she is not here as Lorna, instead she is in character. Playing a part for the camera, exploring the flexibility of identity and even gender.
Of course so many works with such ambiguous meanings can be frustrating for an audience who want to pin down works with more than just subjective conjecture. However, this ambiguity itself lends itself to the nature of many of her contentious subject matters: thankfully unfixed. In the on-going shape-shifting of characters, allusions to embedded stereotypes and superstitions, and misleading memories, there is the promise of antithesis.
Zara Worth is an artist and writer based in the North East. To find out more please visit her website: www.zaraworth.com