This feeling of being digitally scrambled—of being just a body in a Zoom box—feels reflected in the legendary artist Lorna Simpson's latest show Give Me Some Moments at Hauser & Wirth. Though her work is rooted in the very analog practice of collaging, juxtaposing faces and bodies against nature and architecture from vintage Ebony magazines, this breaking down of a visual sense of self translates easily in this Great Age of Zoom Calls. She observed that "the notion of fragmentation, especially of the body, is prevalent in our culture, and it’s reflected in my works. We’re fragmented not only in terms of how society regulates our bodies but in the way we think about ourselves."
In "Construction," the subject's body is afforded so much possibility—the head placed on the construction site, no longer bound by flesh, her physical form poetic and literal. She's a load-bearing column with an opportunity for so much more. Simpson's work makes me think of what kind of new selves can be assembled from fragmentary ones, and that's freeing.
You can check out more of Simpson's collages on Hauser & Wirth's online viewing room here.
