FEATURED ARTIST: LORRAINE SIMMS
URGENCE
Lorraine Simms has been painting professionally since 1991. Her
work is represented in many private and public collections, including the
Canada Council Art Bank and the Musée du Québec. She has taught painting and
drawing at Concordia University and is currently teaching at the Fine Arts
Department at Dawson College.
The word mete (pronounced 'meet'), the title of one of her paintings,
means border -- that special place where different people and cultures meet
and merge or conflict, where form and content always meet, that lends itself
to synthesis, creation. Borders, as they pertain to the visual arts and the
imagination, have been a career-long fascination of Simms', providing both
the ferment and neccessity that cause a work of art to come into being. In
her own words, "Countless photographs of crowds permeate the media landscape,
blurring into a seamless portrait of contemporary experience. Transmitted
instantly around the world for local news publications and broadcasts, images
from disparate locations acquire the same value as spectacle. I am fascinated
and estranged by these representations and wonder to what extent they infiltrate
our imaginations and shape our perceptions of identity and place. Certainly,
feeling “lost in the crowd” has become an integral experience for many who
live in urban centres.
I (try) to negotiate the balance between pictorial description and painterly
invention, transforming the instant, ephemeral quality of photography through
the slow, imperfect actions of the body. These works create a delay, a reflective
space for the viewer; countering the amnesiac effect produced by the visual
speed of television news and journalistic photographs.I often choose images
that appear iconic, recognizing postures and/or scenes that seem embedded
in memory. Eidetic memory (the title of one group of paintings based on different
parts of the same photograph) refers to the ability to freeze and hold a moment
in the minds eye and then contemplate that instant, examine it with greater
clarity. I believe this notion describes the process and the effect of these
works."
