Mary Simpson
Off Hours
November 1 - December 20, 2015
Mary
Simpson, Off Hours
November 1 –
December 20, 2015
Opening
Reception: Sunday, November 1, 6 – 8 pm
Is it true that anything can be changed, seen in any light, and is not
destroyed by the action of shadows? Then you won’t mind when I interrupt you
while you’re working?
–John Cage
Sea change.
What happens to the ear at eye level? Having distanced ourselves from boredom,
no longer seeking horizon, street or an idle face across a table, we are
perpetually receptive. But to what? Before climbing to an altitude where all
direction was lost, before drifting out from shore, before the rhythmic descent
(having swallowed those four red seeds)—before all of this, Kore sat at the
river’s edge and became very still, staring at her reflection in Narcissus.
Eventually
we gave it a name (abduction, seduction, to be led astray, Stockholm) but
before all of this, before she was stolen into and below the earth—Kore raised
her eyes (the ear at eye level) to meet her own face reflected in the pupil of
Hades. She was gone already.
And so the
image seeks a body—not an imprint, not transference—a body that can be seen in
any light, beauty at low temperature. A device lights up one side of the face
only, that which is turned towards it. A device is not older than we are. So we
have to stay, pursuing an image, in the off hours.
–Mary Simpson
Rachel
Uffner Gallery is pleased to present Off Hours, an exhibition of
new work by Mary Simpson. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in New
York.
Playing off
of a cultural shift from boredom to restlessness, and a retreating perspective
unencumbered by devices, Off Hours is a paean to looking and
gazing, to film, painting, and the supposition of objects holding onto their
duration. Painting and filmmaking are two related sides of Simpson’s practice.
Upon entering the first floor hallway, two 16mm films are projected—in A
Feeling of If (2015), we see Jasper Johns’ Connecticut garden in a
succession of meditative, drawn-out shots composed much like Simpson would
frame and layer her canvases. In 10,000 Things(16mm, 2015), we’re
brought into the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s former New York rehearsal
space, Westbeth, where a piano is being prepared for a John Cage score.
Peripheral portraits of postmodern forebears, the space of rehearsal,
arrangement, and cultivation unfolds.
Continuing
into Rachel Uffner’s downstairs space, paintings on canvas and panels surround
a large table in the room’s center. Some canvases are vertically scaled to
one’s own body, some held heavy with impasto, others expansive and departing in
composition. Attempting both image and body, the paintings use architecture,
frame, structure and space to exteriorize the gaze, to take back vibration and
psychological resonance. The table, inset with collage, functions as dining
table and vitrine, playing with masculine and feminine forms as an impossibly
flat kunstkammer for the show.
Mary Simpson was born in
Anchorage, Alaska and currently lives in New York. She received an MFA from
Columbia University and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program. Her
work has shown at Bortolami, On Stellar Rays, Rachel Uffner and Simone Subal,
all New York; David Petersen, Minneapolis; Almine Rech, Brussels; Hilary Crisp,
London; Seattle Art Museum; Boise Art Museum. Film Screenings, projects and
lectures include the Artists Institute, The Kitchen, both New York; Henry Art
Gallery, Seattle; CAM2, Madrid. She teaches at Cooper Union and Columbia
University.
Please call
(212) 274-0064 or email info@racheluffnergallery.com for more information.
