Artist Post #7: Spring Semester

Artist Post #7: Spring Semester 

March 21, 2011

Lorna Simpson

Bio: Lorna Simpson was born in 1960 in Brooklyn, New York, and received her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and her MFA from the University of California, San Diego.  Simpson felt the need to turn the photography world on edge, and examine it in a new way. She first became well known for the image-and-text pairs she produced in the 1980s that questioned gender and identity.   This is the work I am most drawn to because of the element of text added to the images. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Miami Art Museum; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. She has participated in such important international exhibitions as the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, and Documenta XI in Kassel, Germany.

Relation: Similarly to the other artists I have been researching, I am drawn initially to Simpson's work because of the use of the text.  Her aesthetic in her actual images is very different than mine, but the principle behind using text to continue to tell the story of the subject is similar.  Many artists think that the story can be told in image alone, or what is left out is also important. While I agree in some circumstances, I think when there is a story that the artist intends to share that specifically changes from subject to subject, text in the voice of said subject is a powerful storytelling element.  The text in these images, or paired with these images, intrigues me as an extension of the story being told by the photography.  With my images, I am also telling a story in the voice of my subjects by adding text to my images.

Quotes:

"The only thing that I see as developing from the earlier work is that the films are even more about language. I was a little trepidacious about the way that text might translate onto film. Once you have someone mouth the words that you have written down, it's completely different than how a reader consumes that text when it is juxtaposed with a photograph."

"In some ways I'm trying to pull back and not make them completely descriptive of the project. But the photographs stand on their own and have their own interest in the way that the image and text relate. I'm trying to maintain a similar content level to what's in the films, but give a slightly different take with the photographs."

Source for both: http://www.walkerart.org/archive/F/B4737D1B1BCC13206169.htm

Links:

Interview

Artist Website

Gallery Rep