Ghost Nature

Caroline Picard

The predominant cultural tradition prioritises humankind and human culture above all other life forms – a linear, anthropocentric narrative wherein the human appears as the latest, most developed draft of life in a grand opera of consciousness; the opera begins with the origin of a universe that has since continued until now, forward from the darkest beginning of A to an elusive horizon of B: that spot in the distance that shall never be reached. The following exposition reflects notes, quotations, and autobiographical incidents that muddle this mythology. This assemblage of sources composes a constellation without beginning, centre, or end in an effort to enact a more general and omniscient intellectual environment that highlights the longstanding hierarchical expectations inherent in the Western world.

Xaviera Simmons, Index Four, Composition One, >2013. Colour photograph, 50 × 40", edition of 3. Image courtesy of David Castillo Gallery.

Xaviera Simmons, Index Four, Composition Three, 2013. Colour photograph, 50 × 40", edition of 3. Image courtesy of David Castillo Gallery.

Xaviera Simmons, Index Four, Composition Four, 2013. Colour photograph, 50 × 40", edition of 3. Image Courtesy of David Castillo Gallery.

Xaviera Simmons, Index Four, Composition Five, 2013. Colour photograph, 50 × 40", edition of 3. Image courtesy of David Castillo Gallery.

Xaviera Simmons, Index Four, Composition Six, 2013. Colour photograph, 50 × 40", edition of 3. Image courtesy of David Castillo Gallery.

‘For me the landscape, the early explorations of cultural migration, migratory histories and the layering of histories; be they political, societal, art historical or using other ways to interpret concepts of history. I see the landscape at this point as both the most fertile and the most basic ground to overlay the characters that come to me when I engage with these environments. I am forever romanced by the artist’s fascination with the landscape as a topic to explore in painting, sculpture, film photography, text, dance, etc. It’s almost primal, in a way, to begin with the landscape. For so long, until the explosion of the Internet, landscape paintings – then films and National Geographic Magazine and encyclopedias – were the way “everyman/everywoman” in America entered into a relationship with art viewing and art making, I believe.

‘Historical landscape painting is one of the foundations of any art history curriculum, and practically everyone I know has some relationship to “the landscape”. I’m interested in the layering of diverse narratives and in the ways characters can be developed when you complicate a narrative of any given landscape. I think engaging with the sublime is just one way I am working, but I think that is shifting. I am looking now at the sublime as a catalyst to explore other topics found in the idyllic, or rather the notion of the idyllic. The idyllic, the sublime, they are just one complicated way for me to enter into a dialogue with the landscape. Also, the characters that come into the landscapes I engage in are just in direct conversation to the characters I have often missed when viewing the textbook narratives of the West, the Hudson River School and the sublime. I’m interested in populating the landscapes I engage with different types of characters, characters in conflict with or in harmony with the landscape, and I’ve said this before but it bears repeating: I am really intrigued by the diverse narratives that come out of a nation of migrants. I’m American, and being American I feel at fortunate liberty to be in conversation with all of the narratives that make up the inhabitants of the land here, so to that end I feel free to choose, mix and converse with the diverse stories that are populating these spaces now. In a way, all of the histories involving migration, past or present and future, feel up for grabs and a part of the overall narrative that has been layered upon us historically through image and text.’ – Xaviera Simmons, ‘Surveyor: An Interview with Xaviera Simmons’, Artpulse Magazine, 19 April 2012 <http://artpulsemagazine.com/surveyor-an-interview-with-xaviera-simmons> [accessed 19 February 2015].

Xaviera Simmons received her BFA from Bard College (2004) after spending two years on a walking pilgrimage retracing the transatlantic slave trade with Buddhist monks. She completed the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in Studio Art (2005) while simultaneously completing a two-year actor-training conservatory with the Maggie Flanigan Studio. Simmons has exhibited nationally and internationally, with major exhibitions and performances shown at the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the Public Art Fund, and the Sculpture Center. Selected solo and group exhibitions for 2013–14 include Archive as Impetus at the Museum of Modern Art, Underscore at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Open at David Castillo Gallery, Rehearsals at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and Radical Presence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, among many others. Her works are in major museum and private collections including Deutsche Bank, UBS, the Guggenheim Museum, the Agnes Gund Art Collection, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Studio Museum in Harlem, MOCA Miami, and Perez Art Museum Miami.

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