Image: Krakow Witkin Gallery, Boston
Lorna Simpson’s exhibition at Krakow Witkin Gallery presents text- and image-based works made between 1991 and 2002. The works explore identity, memory, race, concealment, desire, and transformation through photography, text, lithography, and installation.
The material and conceptual variety of the pieces on view speaks to the numerous approaches that Simpson used during a highly pivotal period in her work. The presentation includes ‘Wigs’ (1994), ‘Van Der Zee Prop Vase’ (1994), and ‘15 Mouths’ (2002).
The gallery identifies ‘IS’ as the earliest work in the exhibition, dating to 1991. In ‘IS’, a traditional gelatin silver print, a cropped image depicts what appears to be a Black woman or girl wearing a uniform shirt and skirt. The head is cropped out, while the figure’s left hand holds what might be notebooks or pamphlets. The letters ‘IS’ appear on the left breast of the shirt, bold enough to seem added on top of the photograph, although the text is in the image and the word exists in the same reality as the figure.
The work asks who the pictured person is and what she is doing, while leaving undetermined what the viewer makes of the figure’s presence. It also asks viewers to bring their own assumptions to the work and to question what they bring. Most of the figures in Simpson’s pictures, usually Black women, were filmed with their backs to the camera, making them generic presences adaptable to any narrative; the implication is that narratives about race are conditional and subjective, created by personal experience, interpretation, and memory.
‘Wigs’ is presented as a set of 38 lithographs on felt, comprising 21 photographic lithographs and 17 text-based lithographs.
