January 18–May 4, 2008

 

L O R N A   S I M P S O N   b. New York, 1960

Lorna Simpson's layered works encompass the archaeological, the archival, and the forensic. The language of her pictorial analysis always seems to play out in the interstices of the historical and psychic constitution of the black subject. The photographic works included here—Untitled (guess who’s coming to dinner) (2001) and Study (2002)—are embedded in this landscape of race, generated from the misperceptions and misrepresentations common to American stereotypes of black subjects. In both works, Simpson effects an archival realignment, one describing the gulf between the portrayed black subjects—a woman in Untitled and a man in Study—and the scenes of representation found in American films and art. Untitled aligns forty-three oval portraits in vertical rows underneath semitransparent Plexiglas; incised on the left and right sides of the Plexiglas surface are titles of American films produced from the turn of the twentieth century to the late 1960s. The same strategy obtains in Study, but here the titles are taken from paintings in American museum collections in which the black male figures as subject or object. Recently, Simpson has turned to the online economy of ebay auctions, where she has acquired institutional films produced during the late 1950s and early 1960s. In Jackie (2007), she uses footage from one such film—a three-minute interval in which a teacher instructs a young white boy to draw on a piece of paper—and adds to this her own drawings as a response to the command to draw. Presented here for the first time, Jackie addresses the invisible ways in which mental health institutions retrain certain segments of the American population and, as such, correlates the way institutions consistently mark the American body.

 

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