Superimposing the faces of black women from fashion and wig adverts found in the pages of Ebony magazine, Lorna Simpson unveils, through repetition, the stereotypes in the everyday images we consume. On 16 June, a new solo exhibition of the acclaimed African-American artist’s work, titled Special Characters, will open at Hauser & Wirth in Hong Kong.
Born in Crown Heights, New York to a father who had escaped Castro-era Cuba, and an African-American mother from Chicago, Simpson started taking photographs when she was young, using money she’d saved from Kleenex box coupons to buy a Polaroid camera. She attended Manhattan’s High School of Art and Design, and later the School of Visual Arts, before working as a documentary photographer capturing street scenes. She turned to conceptual practice and collaging soon after, then three-decades later, painting turbulent images inspired by nature in inky blue-blacks on king-sized canvases. She’s now one of the most significant artists of her time, recycling existing imagery that explores identity, specifically presentation and how beauty ideals often ignore the black experience.
Straight away, Simpson’s work attracted attention with photo-text images, evoking aspects of black women’s lives. An early collage series titled Five Day Forecast, depicted five duplicates of a black and white image of a woman’s torso, her arms crossed and the words “misdescription, misinformation, misidentify, misdiagnose, mistranslate” below. The text chronicled a breakdown in communication that can be experienced by women, be it personal, professional or racial. It was also a play on the word ‘miss,’ which raises questions about gender, identity and therefore power relations.
Another way she explores identity is through hair as culturally coded symbols of sex, race, ethnicity and religion. Seen in arguably her most famous work Stereo Styles from 1988, are 10 instant film pictures placed on engraved plastic of Alva Rogers, a performance artist, singer, and actress, in different hairstyles with text that reads, in generic advertising lingo, “Daring, Sensible, Severe, Long & Silky, Boyish, Ageless, Silky, Magnetic, Country Fresh, and Sweet.” Hair also features in the chronologically arranged ropes of braid, and in her 1994 series Wigs that hung various hairpieces on felt, composed like portraiture on the walls of an aristocrat’s manor.
In her latest images, showcased at Hauser & Wirth, photo collages are imbued with images of nature, often replacing women’s hair for trees and corals, lightning, rocks and stars, while vibrant paintings ‘Bright’ and ‘Most Relevant’ use shades of yellow and green to wash over a woman’s face in black and white. Each portrayal has an unwavering gaze, giving off a power that comes from looking, visibility, and representation. Both present and obscured, the duality in the collages creates a sense of disconnection between her subject’s physical appearance and their inner psyche. “They are surreal portraits in a way,” explains Lorna Simpson of her work. “For me, the photo collages are a surreal, very simple, exploration of my subconscious over the course of time.”
Simpson stays true to her practice in continuing to plant artefacts of culture within nature — “I do not feel as though issues of identity are exhaustible,” she told Bomb magazine in 1997. “I feel that my critique of identity, which in the past work may be the most obvious, becomes the foreground or recedes given the structures of the text or the type of narrative that I impose on the work.”
Lorna Simpson’s Special Characters will show at Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong from 16 June – 30 September 2020
Editor
Emma RussellCredit
Header Image: © Lorna Simpson Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
