Lorna Simpson presents her work, Momentum, 2011, at the Paramount Pictures Studio, during the Frieze LA 2020.
Feb 14 - 16, 2020
The Paramount Pictures Studio, 5515 Melrose Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90038
Lorna Simpson: in the studio
Lorna Simpson talks to Frieze about her life and work in her Brooklyn studio. Simpson came to prominence in the 1980s through her pioneering approach to conceptual photography, which featured striking juxtapositions of text and staged images and raised questions about the nature of representation, identity, gender, race and history. These concerns are reflected in the artist’s expanding and increasingly multi-disciplinary practice today.
Momentum, 2011 HD video, 6 min. loop, 2 channels"In Momentum, the camera not only functions as the missing studio mirror for the dancers but also visualizes the memory of the artist behind the camera. Indeed, it documents the artist's perspective in the process of art making, objectively capturing the dancers' waiting and preparation as Simpson corrects the lighting and sets the color balance. Similarly, it reflexively incorporates its own editing, using abrupt cuts and loops to craft a sense of time that makes visible the respective blind spots and circularity of the artist's memory. While Simpson does not physically appear before the camera, the group of nearly two dozen dancers function as a refracted image of her performing self.""In Momentum, Simpson transforms the memory of a bygone moment into a legible form. Transcribing a historical moment into a communicable experience, she constructs a score- one dancer spins until exhaustion and walks off; a second takes her position and repeats- which renders a fleeting form available for viewing after its iteration."-Thomas J. Lax