Artist, Lorna Simpson: I’m thinking about language and image and construction of self.
My name is Lorna Simpson. You are looking at my untitled work from 1992.
The top row consists of black boxes with text. The middle portion of images is a torso of a figure dressed in a suit. And at the bottom, are shoes. The photographs are placed in this stack from box to torso to foot.
In stepping back, it poses the question: What am I looking at? There’s no head, but there’s a box there. There’s no legs and feet, but there are shoes there. There’s one central thing—the body—that the viewer may relate to, but it’s fragmented. I would say maybe it’s dismantling parts of the body, and not giving the viewer everything, and providing text that seems completely off-subject. There is some abstraction within that. In some ways, one could view everyone’s interiority as abstraction.
I was trying, in this work, to talk about race, to talk about the kind of binary way we think about gender in society. These works work as a device to say that there isn’t a singular way to be.