Since the mid-1980s, Brooklyn-based artist Lorna Simpson has made the photographic image and its framing, reception, and interpretation her modus operandi. Simpson’s first real engagement with photography came in the late 1970s, when she traveled extensively around Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and the US, documenting the people and places she encountered. Following that immersive period, she began building juxtapositions of craftily staged studio images and text that have displayed a consistent distrust toward the image, its supposed objectivity, neutrality and implied truth.Sensitive to the ways in which black, and often female, bodies have been historically represented, consumed and appropriated by a dominant white discourse, Simpson has made questions of race, gender, identity, memory and political consciousness integral to her practice, which has grown to include not only photography, but film and video, painting, collage and sculpture.Her first show at London’s Hauser & Wirth —“Unanswerable,” on view through April 28 — brings together a series of recent and new work in painting, photographic collage and sculpture that continue her investigations into how African American cultural history and “blackness” can stage its own narratives without being subsumed into the dialectic of “otherness.” For Simpson, this aversion to stereotypes relates as much to the subjects she depicts as to how the artist’s own intentions and identity — and the aesthetic that presumes — are automatically pre-read into her work.The exhibition takes its title from an eponymous work, “Unanswerable,” 2018, a composition of 40-plus photo collages, each of which incorporates material from Simpson’s personal collection of vintage “Ebony” and “Jet” magazines from the 1950s to ’70s, lifestyle publications that were aimed at predominantly African American readers and were a chronicle of under represented voices across culture, lifestyle and politics. In one piece, the head of a young black woman, midspeech, has been collaged on to a white-shirted figure sitting in front of a microphone in, what appears to be, the witness stand of a courtroom, her torso partially obscured by snowy mounds of ice. A thin red line, barely perceptible against the black-and-white composition, frames this figure — a carefully coordinated frame-within-a-frame.Else where, another female form stares up at a thick plume of smoke that billows out incongruously from a bouquet of flowers. Ice features prominently, both as visual content and metaphor, not least in Simpson’s paintings, a medium that she has returned to for the first time in two decades. “Ice,” 2017, is a series of collaged paintings that blend newsprint and photographs of ice, glaciers and smoke with washes of grey, black and cyanide blue ink that make the source material barely legible.Simpson has previously recalled the significance of ice referring both the expression to be “on ice,” or in prison, a form of enforced isolation, but also its suggestion of endurance. I like to think that ice’s inherently shape-shifting qualities are also another way for Simpson’s work to escape the compart mentalization that it may otherwise be subjected to. In yet another collage from the “Unanswerable” series, a pair of female eyes stares out directly at us, the rest of the face masked by a motorcycle helmet, while largeblocks of piled up ice obscure the figure’s body. What story do these eyes, at once inviting and mocking, have to tell us among these fragments? Unanswerable.- This article appears in the March 2018 edition of Modern Painters
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