Northern Lights
2010
Arthur Simms
Staten Island, New York
Artworks shown are selected from works submitted by the artist in their grant or residency application. All works are copyright of the artist or artist’s estate.
About Arthur Simms
Program Participation
Joan Mitchell Center Residency, 2013
Painters & Sculptors Grant, 1997
Rich with associations to my hybrid autobiography, American and Jamaican folk culture, music, art history and world culture, my human-scale sculptures radiate a playful and serious inquiry into concepts of origin and transformation. My art is to a large extent a product of bi-culturalism, a merging of my Jamaican heritage and American education. Through their formal rigor and the poetic associations that the recycled elements trigger, the sculptures narrate stories of personal identity, family, spiritual and physical journeys, erotic tensions and nostalgia for home. Bedsprings, empty bottles, machines, children's worn-out toys and other discards of our material lives take on a new world of symbolic meanings, powered by my unconscious and pent-up energy unleashed from objects that, to a less sensitive eye, might appear to be junk.
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