Sean Kelly Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition of a new film and two new video works by Lorna Simpson.
Lorna Simpson's exhibition is comprised of three works, which are being presented in New York for the first time. Corridor, a dual channel projection, in the Main Gallery, was filmed on location in the Boston area in two houses, the 17th-century 'Coffin House' and in the 20th-century 'Gropius House', which Walter Gropius designed and lived in when he moved to America. A single woman appears in each of the houses. The women, played by the same actress, in period and contemporary clothing, carry out everyday tasks appropriate to the era of the two buildings. The audio component of the video is comprised of two musical sound tracks, which overlap and draw the viewers' attention to individual sequences. One hears music by the mid 19th century black piano prodigy Blind Tom, played by John Davis, which corresponds to the 'Coffin House' and for the 'Gropius House,' the music of American jazz composer Albert Ayler. In Gallery 2 there is a new dual channel video installation, Blue to Black, which depicts an argument between two women. The actresses were given only general direction and much of the dialogue is spontaneous. The video on the left shows the women inside a building; on the right we see the building's exterior, through a window in which the women can be seen, but not heard, arguing. The sound in the gallery is localized, so that the viewer hears the argument and a voiceover giving direction to the actresses if one stands in front of the recording of the interior scene. Cloudscape, in Gallery 1, is a 16mm black and white film, presented on a monitor, of a man whistling an American composition from the late 1800s. It recalls Simpson's video Easy to Remember (2001), which was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial.
Simpson's recent solo exhibitions have included: Lorna Simpson: 31, Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art Northwestern University, Evanston, IL; Lorna Simpson, Consejo Nacional Para la Cultura y las Artes, Mexico City, Mexico; Lorna Simpson, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland and Lorna Simpson, Cameos and Appearances and Lorna Simpson: 31, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Recent group exhibitions have included: Open House: Working in Brooklyn, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; Public/Private/Tumatanui/Tumataiti, The Second Auckland Triennial, Auckland, New Zealand; Image Stream, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; Yankee Remix, MassMoCA, North Adams, MA; Printemps de Septembre à Toulouse: Fragilités, Festival de Photographie et Arts Visuels, Toulouse, France; Retrospectacle, Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Documenta XI, Kassel, Germany and the 2002 Whitney Biennial, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Simpson has exhibited extensively in museums worldwide, her works are included in the collections of many prominent museums including: the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; the Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, to name but a few.
