The Utah Museum of Fine Arts presents an exhibition of work by Xaviera Simmons on view through February 26, 2012.
Xaviera Simmons, Maps, 2010, color photograph, courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York, NY.
salt 4: Xaviera Simmons is the fourth in the Museum’s series of exhibitions featuring innovative art from around the world. New York-based Xaviera Simmons uses photography, as well as other mediums including installation and performance, to construct multivalent narratives of collective and personal histories. Simmons’s work often references traditions of American landscape painting, exploring depictions of the individual in nature. In her large-format photographs, scenery becomes a central character, harboring the stories of immigrants and migrants. Archetypal figures, like sages and nomads, serve as conduits for open-ended narratives embedded in the land, allowing entrance into, in the artist’s words, “other characters, narratives, and geographies.” In addition to photography, the exhibition includes a sculptural installation made of hand-lettered, locally found wooden scraps—materials chosen for their ubiquitous use in vernacular signage—affixed directly to the gallery wall. This tangled matrix of text gleaned from notes, conversation, news articles, folklore, poetry, and literature, forms its own kind of lyrical landscape, imbued with historical and personal memory.
