[...] By the early 1990’s, the artist was completing an ambitious series exploring protheses [literally painting blown-up ‘sketches’ of artificial body parts -- heart valves, knee replacements, etc. ...] as a reference to the “Cartesian mind / body dichotomy” (1) -- a CENTRE of ‘meaning’, then, fast-losing currency in wake of [‘au courant’] social theory reporting the inevitability of ‘the [human]body obsolete’. ... Visual reference to ‘the body obsolete’ -- THAT so-called, ‘third’, and final, [technological] stage of evolution: a world of part-flesh, part-cyberspace ... microchip nerves, spectral vision, ... multiple-floating personalities and perspectives, ... -- would most certainly have sparked further debate between contemporary scientists and neo-conservative theists.
[...] In 1995, Simms was engaged in a suite entitled ‘Nomenclature’ : close-up views of trees and water which were over painted with the ‘first’ names [therefore intentionally cryptic? posing as signature / memorial ??] of women artists -- “an exploration of issues of authorship and identity” ... “linked to a feminist practice of naming” -- a not-so subtle reminder tat painting (especially landscape-art) has remained a gender-biased / male dominated practice ? [...] Next [late 1990’s], a brief dance with portraiture -- “a two-faced world at risk of loss” -- a Janus-glimpse at more appropriate, ‘gentille’-gender subject matter? -- a wink at Jungian ‘animus’ / ‘anima’ ?? -- ultimately, a ‘pause’ leading to the 2001, ‘Shadow’ series (and beyond). ‘Shadow’, a sequence of mass-media inspired paintings, at once continued to underscore a current-day, troubling, fractal subjectivity and, all-the-while, [like in the aforementioned series] suggested the theoretical need for the emergence of a new ‘correctness’.
[Aside] Reader beware: Any evolution of a new ‘correctness’ -- any emergence of a new and responsible society -- may very well be fleeting, illusory, if not precarious, [at this point in history] because it would necessarily spring out of a universal ‘negativity’ -- that is, Western society’s pervasive and broad-sweeping fear of loss of privilege, impotence in the face of overwhelming, self-indulgent powers, and despair over the failure of a ‘liberal’ consensus. ... And so the gap between the real and the ideal becomes an ever-reopened wound ... a ‘human suffering’ described by the likes of Sartre, Benjamin and Adorno as ‘the wound of [recent] history’. [...]
... and finally the ‘Fugitive’ collection [2006 - ] of larger-than-life, untitled (except by #), oil on canvas compositions, builds upon ‘Shadow’s’ [re]manipulation of “images clipped from newspapers, photographed directly from the television screen or downloaded from the Internet”. On a formal level, Simms values the anomalies present in these appropriated images -- their blurriness, pixilation, lens-distortion, unpredictable lighting, etc., -- and incorporates these qualities into her painting vocabulary. A balance between [fast] pictorial expression via the camera and [slower] painterly invention by the brush is concerted. In measure, through this double-’entente’, the conventional understanding of a portrait as a reasonable likeness of the sitter whose physical attributes might be read as indicators of ‘character’ is skewed.
[...] The world of electronic mass-media has undoubtedly created much tension between our public and private selves and has engendered an uneasy moment in time rife with social anxiety and stress. Human senses have been externalized into a vast ‘sensus communis’ -- at once a symbol of surveillance and of detached involvement. The media offers [only] images as aftereffects of realized events -- simulacrum of human experience -- mirrored images (reflections of the ‘actual’ - although frequently ‘slanted’ or sensationalized) ever-colliding with desire for a ‘new’ encoding of ‘meaningful’ social roles and values.
In ‘Fugitive’, Simms portraits are exclusively female, media-recognized ‘players’ -- women already ‘reported’, most of all, for petty crimes or misdemeanors. Their art-image portrayal, at least twice removed from the mug-shot, becomes a cultural construct in ‘Fugitive’. The ‘subject’ -- the [once?] fugitive -- is entirely disenfranchised from an awareness of the artist’s ‘study’ or the exhibition visitor’s gaze. “Images taken from the popular media entered the private realm of Simms studio where they were reimagined and gradually reworked into paintings about collective memory. Many things changed in the process: frozen figures softened into blurred movement; raw evidentiary facts were irrationally coloured; difficulties of remembering were expressed.” [Martha Langford, ‘Fugitive’ exhibition-catalogue essayist]
In high-tech, mass-media, the sender is the receiver. The newspaper, the television, the computer, ... all are irreversible mediums of communication WITHOUT response.
... Does Simm’s ‘Fugitive’ question the legitimacy of image-makers’ / viewers’ transgressions of private space via art or the media? ... reflect upon our techno-cultural imprisonment in a processed world of abstract power?? ....or accept the complacent-normalacy of the present-day ’social’ as being in a state of psychasthenia [i.e., coordinates of the ‘correct’ lost in the unfathomable twists, and far-reaching excesses, of an info-storm] ???
... Will it be the righteous or the profane who saunter about like statesmen at our [near] end of history ?
T.L. Mtl. 2007
(1) unless otherwise indicated all “quotes” are Simms, from exhibition press releases or catalogue texts, 1989 - 2007.
