Scenarios: Recent Work by Lorna Simpson at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Scenarios: Recent Work by Lorna Simpson 
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 
April 11 - July 11, 1999

Brooklyn-based artist Lorna Simpson, who has used photography, text, and most recently, narrative film to raise complex social issues, is the subject of a Walker Art Center exhibition to be on view in Minneapolis April 11 July 11, 1999. Scenarios: Recent Work by Lorna Simpson, curated by Walker Assistant Curator Siri Engberg, features the artist's most recent single- and multiple-projection film installations, including a work commissioned by the Walker, as well as photographic pieces related to the film projects. Photographs made by the artist during the shooting of the films will accompany each film installation, as will photographically based large-scale works printed on felt, a medium the artist has increasingly employed in her work. A gallery brochure with text will accompany the exhibition.

Lorna Simpson has been well known since the mid-1980s for her provocative photographs, paired with text, that address issues ranging from racial and sexual identity to notions of the body, to interpersonal communication and relationships. Trained at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, she received her M.A. from the University of California, San Diego, where she studied film and fine arts. She began her career as a documentary photographer but soon found herself, as she has said, "tired of the viewer's approach to looking at documentary images." Interested in the way a photograph is "read" she began to create conceptual compositions pairing minimalist black-and-white images with text. 

In Lorna Simpson's earliest works she used an African-American model, often wearing a simple white dress. Lorna Simpson removed all information that would allow the subject to be identified as a particular individual, thereby inviting the viewer's own experience as a means of interpreting the image and its text. In the mid-1990s Simpson began creating editions whose photographic imagery and texts were printed on panels of felt of the sort used on printing press beds. Often hung in groupings to create large-scale images or multi-image tableaux, the visual fragments combined to create an identity or narrative.

What began as an interest in the figure has given way in Simpson's more recent work to an interest in space and narrative, a shift coinciding with her recent explorations in the medium of film. In 1996, during a residency at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, she used the Wexner's Art and Technology Lab to create Interior/Exterior, Full/Empty, a seven-projection film piece screened simultaneously on three walls. Each projection presents differing narratives delivered by characters who move in and out of what may or may not be an interlinking story. The following year Simpson made Call Waiting , a short black-and-white single-projection work that centers around notions of communication and relationships, presenting characters whose lives are woven together through a series of telephone conversations and interrupted calls.

In 1997-1998, Lorna Simpson participated in the Walker's Artist-In-Residence program working with Twin Cities community members and actors to create the film Recollection . Commissioned by the Walker, and first screened as part of the Hugo Boss Prize: 1998 at the Guggenheim Soho in New York, Recollection focuses on the characters' use of fragmented narrative memories to reconstruct past events. The film is accompanied by a new 18-foot-long felt piece incorporating photographs taken on location in Minneapolis. 

Scenarios: Recent Work by Lorna Simpson is made possible by generous support from the Arthur and Alice Kramer Foundation. Lorna Simpson's 1997-98 Artist Residency was part of the Walker Art Center's "New Definitions/New Audiences" initiative, a museum-wide project to engage visitors in a reexamination of 20th century art, made possible by the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund. The film Recollection was commissioned by the Walker Art Center through the Artist-in-Residence program, with additional support from the Penny McCall Foundation, New York.

WALKER ART MUSEUM
Vineland Place, Minneapolis, MN 55403
www.walkerart.org

Updated 23.06.2019