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Lorna Simpson at Blue Sky Gallery
December 7, 2017 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
As a final exhibition commemorating the Embodied: Asserting Self exhibition series, Blue Sky presents Lorna Simpson: from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer, which includes two major bodies of work by Simpson: Wigs (1994) and Details (1996). Wigs is a collection of twenty-one lithographs depicting hair pieces and seventeen corresponding texts printed on felt. The images and texts emphasize the significance of hair in relation to dominant beauty standards and focus on a wide range of styles, including Afros, braided hair, blond locks, and doll wigs. Details consists of twenty-one photogravures accompanied by silkscreened captions. The imagery of the photogravures comes from the artist’s collection of family photos that she has edited and tightly cropped to focus on gestures and hands, while the cryptic text creates a fragmentary but open-ended narrative. In both works, Simpson references the body without including it, or leaves out defining facial features to preserve her subjects’ anonymity, inviting viewers to place themselves or imagine others within these visual spaces.