Archive of Digital Portraits Cast in Concrete
Announcing artist Blair Simmons’s New Solo Exhibition —“Archive of Digital Portraits Cast in Concrete”
On view at TheBLANC gallery from October 26th, 2022 through November 15th, 2022, the queer and anxious artist Blair Simmons will unveil her solo exhibition “Archive of Digital Portraits Cast in Concrete”. The exhibition will present 11 concrete sculptural portraits of the cached web histories and digital identities of the artist’s friends and family.
The exhibited sculptures are made of discarded technologies derived from the people in the artist’s life. These sculptures are cast in concrete and then exposed by hammering and chiseling. Through the process of art-making, the artist aims to revisit the daily pain of working and labor that emerged from her research-driven pedagogy process: warping, distorting, grinding, and wearing down. She examines her relationships with technology as both dependent and critical.
She also tries to visualize the tension generated by the severe anxiety disorder, of chronic pain, and migraines that she experiences in the body. This collection of works examines her conflicting feelings toward technology, as both see it as an exit and an origin of her pain.
Blair Simmons is a queer and anxious artist, researcher, storyteller, and technician working with multiple mediums. She is currently teaching at the Interactive Media Arts and Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. Her interest in creation resides in logic, language, structures, pain, patterns, maps, math, arrows, analysis, arches, queerness, bodies, failure, uselessness, organics, and opposites. Her research materializes as objects and performances which have been performed at the likes of Pioneer Works, La Mama’s CultureHub, Wordhack at Babycastles, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Press releases and reports of her are published in PARtake, The Scotsman, USA Today, The Guardian, etc.
The reception for the exhibition will be held at 3 pm, Oct 29th, 2022 at TheBLANC gallery, located at 2FL, 15E 40th Street in midtown manhattan, New York City. Together with the artist, TheBLANC gallery cordially invites all to experience the artist’s interpretation of the tangles between technology and herself.
For further concerns or questions, please contact us via email at: info@theblanc.art