Sundown (Number Twenty)
2019 - Photography (Photography)
152.4 x 114.3 cm
Xaviera Simmons
Xaviera Simmons often employs her own body and collected materials in the service of her photographs and performances. Not to be mistaken as mere portraiture, however, Simmons’ works are explorations of the Black body in relation to landscape and other dimensions of non-linear space and time. Concealing and flattening her subjects with costumes and collage-like, abstract pictorial devices, the artist arranges archival photographs, printed textiles, and anthropological artifacts in configurations that highlight the power of visual culture to shape contemporary understandings of the self. Dressed in wax-printed broadcloth, the subject of Sundown (Number Twenty) holds a photograph from the Jim Crow era in her left hand and an African mask in her right. The busy backdrop of tropical flora reinforces problematic associations of fantasy and exoticism suggested by the masked figure. Simultaneously concealing and replacing her own image, Simmons allows her individual identity to dissolve into the cultural constructs and histories that each artefact and image holds.
Artist Xaviera Simmons’s diverse body of work is committed to multiplicity. Eschewing linear notions of history, her approach to investigating themes such as the shifting notions surrounding landscape and the conditions of African American female experience are cyclical in nature. Her studio practice demonstrates a fidelity to no single artistic modality or creative process; rather, Simmons’ interdisciplinary pursuits are in constant, active flux. Encompassing installation, photography, performance, and sound and video works, her evolving approach to artmaking is emblematic of the plurality of cultural experience and the myriad ways in which identity is constructed in contemporary culture.
Colors:
Related works featuring themes of: » Artist as Ethnographer, » Collective History, » Contemporary Fact Versus Fiction, » Figures in Nature, » American
© » KADIST
Bani Abidi
2008The threshold in contemporary Pakistan between the security of private life and the increasingly violent and unpredictable public sphere is represented in Abidi’s 2009 series Karachi ...
© » KADIST
Bani Abidi
2012The perceived effortlessness of power, projecting above experiences of labored subordination is examined in Death at a 30 Degree Angle by Bani Abidi, which funnels this projection of image through the studio of Ram Sutar, renowned in India for his monumental statues of political figures, generally from the post-independence generation...
© » KADIST
Daniel Crooks
2014The Illusion of Everything (2014) follows an unseen pedestrian as he navigates the Australian city of Melbourne’s dense and intricate network of laneways...
© » KADIST
Vincent Leong
2012The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city...
© » KADIST
Kwan Sheung Chi
2007A Flags-Raising-Lowering Ceremony at my home’s cloths drying rack (2007) was realized in the year of the 10th anniversary of the establishment of The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China...
© » KADIST
Allan Sekula
1973San Pedro is a seaside city, part of the Los Angeles Harbor, sitting on the edge of a channel...
© » KADIST
Agnieszka Kurant
2022For Sentimentite Agnieszka Kurant collaborated with Justin Lane, CEO and Co-Founder of CulturePulse, to gather global sentiment data that has been harvested from millions of Twitter and Reddit posts related to 100 seismic events in recent history...
© » KADIST
Claudia Joskowicz
2007The primary interest in the trilogy is Joskowicz’s use of cinematic space, with long tracking shots that portray resistance to habitual viewing experiences of film and television...
© » KADIST
Miljohn Ruperto
2013Miljohn Ruperto’s high-definition video Janus takes its name from the two-faced Roman god of duality and transitions, of beginnings and endings, gates and doorways...
© » KADIST
Yoan Capote
2007Open Mind is a model created by Capote for a traversable public maze that, when seen from above, resembles the human brain...
© » KADIST
Carlos Amorales
2005Produced on the occasion of an exhibition at ARTIUM of Alava, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art, this deck of cards is a selection of images from Carlos Amorales’s Liquid Archive...
© » KADIST
Wong Wai Yin
2021Drawn from the widely circulated images of protests around the world in support of women rights and racial equality, the phrase I can’t believe we are still protesting is both the title of Wong Wai Yin’s photographic series and a reference to similar messages seen on protest signages...
© » KADIST
Chen Chieh-Jen
2010Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc...
© » KADIST
Wong Wai Yin
2021Drawn from the widely circulated images of protests around the world in support of women rights and racial equality, the phrase I can’t believe we are still protesting is both the title of Wong Wai Yin’s photographic series and a reference to similar messages seen on protest signages...
© » KADIST
Sharon Lockhart
2011Visalia Livestock Market, Visalia, California results from Lockhart’s prolonged investigation of an agricultural center and community...