| LORNA SIMPSON |
Born in Brooklyn in 1960, Lorna Simpson earned a B.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts, New York and a M.F.A. from the University of California, San Diego. Since the mid-1980s, Simpson has achieved national prominence addressing politically-charged issues such as gender, identity, history and race through her formally elegant, large-scale photographs and--more recently--films and videos. Simpson is best known for works linking texts with potent images, requiring the viewer to help interpret their often enigmatic meanings. In 2006-07, a comprehensive mid-career survey of Simpson’s work was exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Miami Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston. Simpson is represented in the collections of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Miami Art Museum.
In the mid-1990s, Simpson began creating large, multi-panel photographs printed on felt such as The Staircase. These shadowy, soft-focused images of deserted parks, buildings and other urban spaces are melancholy and faintly sinister, calling to mind the backdrops of film noir. The evocative text panel accompanying this image may allude to a lover’s tryst:
Her apartment was on the ground floor, which/meant she was in earshot of footsteps and/conversations. As the climber/
reached the 10th step, there was a break in the/rhythm of the climbing, because its riser was/ slightly lower than the rest.
From her apartment/it sounded as they had tripped,/especially those who were unfamiliar with this/ inconsistency. She
could hear the warnings/offered by tenants as they guided their guests/to their floor; particularly when they were/assisted in
carrying something; the apologies/ when they had forgotten to mention it in/ time; or the conversations that took place in/
midstream, that indicated the level of /familiarity between climbers. There were some/other sounds, not too long ago that
seemed/to be coming from the landing below. They were/ faint and unrecognizable. It did not sound like talking, but more
like the rhythmic lifting/of a heavy object
Another impression of The Staircase was included in the exhibition Lorna Simpson, shown at the
Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles, April - July 2006; the Miami Art Museum, October 2006 -
January 2007; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, February - May 2007; and the
Gibbs Museum of Art, Charleston, September - December 2007. [See Okwui Enwezor, "Repetition
and Differentiation/Lorna Simpson’s Iconography of the Racial Sublime," in Lorna Simpson, exh.
cat., 2006, p. 125 (ill. p. 69).]
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