As told to A.i.A. I started this in the fall of 2019. Before that, I was primarily making these cutout paintings that are larger-than-life figures, like 7 feet tall. I still paint those a lot. I hadn’t really painted before on a rectangular canvas, other than in college. So this was like my reentry into a more traditional format for painting. 

Clothing is a point of inspiration for me. I started painting people wearing different clothes and masks and headwear that are a bit fantastical and are at varying levels of obstructing the faces. This was pre-Covid: that hadn’t really entered my world yet, so I don’t know exactly what prompted me to start depicting masks. But, obviously, they soon became much more relevant. There’s also a sort of superhero-fantasy vibe to the painting, which comes from me learning to draw by tracing comic books and this X-Men encyclopedia I had as a kid. 

The figure in the center changed over time. As you’re painting, especially if you’re spending months or years on something, characters start to develop a personality. When I began this, I went through a breakup. I didn’t mean for it to happen, but that character sort of took on the persona of the person I’d dated. That figure was the hardest to finish. It was a bit of a battle. I hesitate to articulate some concrete meaning or interpretation of what he’s supposed to convey. But I will say he was emotional to flesh out. There’s a calm kind of fear to him, and I think that’s connected to what I was going through while I was working.

The head pieces obstruct the figures’ faces in ways that hinder or maybe enhance them in some decorative way. Wearing a mask affects the way you communicate with someone, especially when their face is obscured too. I was thinking about fashion and adornment and decorating yourself to attract or repel interaction. Sometimes you want to attract, but other times you might want to repel, maybe by creating a force field around yourself for protection.

Backgrounds and settings are not the fun part for me. I’m not sure where these people are exactly, but I get the sensation of weather, a feeling of the air and wind and movement. It feels like a bit sexual to me, like a party, but also kind of ominous. I want it to be a little unclear.

Everyone’s dressed in this kind of real-but-unreal way. It feels related to other stuff I’ve done, with gay guys and weird outfits. It’s like a version of a gay bar, some exaggerated version of a real place. But it is quite different from my other work. I feel like this is maybe a world that I’ll go back to.  

Over the past decade, Simpson has produced a veritable pantheon of clay beings that honor Pueblo traditions while anticipating an upcoming apocalypse. Bearing such hallmark signifiers as slit eyes, absent limbs, and desert tones, these figures serve as characters in a quiet but profound epic that begins in the Southwest—in northern New Mexico, to be exact—but whose relevance extends into the beyond.

Check out a recent Art in America feature about Simpson by Lou Cornum from our November 2022 issue.

Watch the full video above or on the official Art in America YouTube channel.

Video Transcript

My name is Rose B. Simpson. The exhibition is called “Road Less Traveled,” and it’s at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. “Road Less Traveled” is me challenging the very things that I took for granted or the processes that seemed easy and often are unhealthy. And if I take some time and witness what’s possible, I can transform my own reality and hopefully, by default, help other people, too.

The work represents my own journey, whether it’s psychological investigation, a new spiritual awareness, or it’s a very practical emotional or psychological space that I need to inhabit in order to transform my reality. The work offers me a reflection of what’s possible and I make it and I visualize it, and then it becomes… a thing. And then I get to witness this thing, and from it, I get to grow. Every single mark on the surface of these pieces means something. Either they’re stars, they’re X’s, which represent protection, or they represent tracks or days or the marking of time or the process around journey. When I use things like beads in a line or I put a line of markings in a row, it’s a specific number, like seven generations, or it’s seven directions, or it represents the months of the year. To me, it represents the process of going somewhere. So, the journey that we’re on.

Video Credits

Featuring: Rose B. Simpson
Producer and Editor: Christopher Garcia Valle
Director of Photography: Jasdeep Kang
Music: Jakariwing
Copy Edits: Emily Watlington
Additional Edits: Jacob Amorelli

Droitcour is a writer, translator and PhD candidate in comparative literature at New York University. He published the article “The Perils of Post-Internet Art” in A.i.A.‘s November 2014 issue; it grew out of his much-talked about blog post “Why I Hate Post-Internet Art,” published earlier this year. He also penned the April 2014 article “Young Incorporated Artists,” which looked at artist collectives like K-Hole and the Jogging.

Droitcour served as editor of Klaus_eBooks, a digital imprint for artists’ books published by New York’s Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery. Upcoming projects include editing “The Animated Reader: Poetry of Surround Audience,” a poetry anthology that will accompany “Surround Audience,” the New Museum’s 2015 triennial (Feb. 25-May 24), curated by Lauren Cornell and Ryan Trecartin.

Bentley edits publications for various institutions, notably the exhibition catalogues Gauguin: Metamorphoses (2014) and Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-71 (forthcoming in 2015) for New York’s Museum of Modern Art, as well as the Museum der Moderne Salzburg’s Simone Forti: Thinking with the Body (2014).

Bentley previously worked as an editor and contributor to Artforum magazine. He has written on a diverse range of subjects, including the artist Robert Beck, HBO’s “Grey Gardens” and Qatar’s Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art.

Photos by Paola Ferrario.

O. HENRY OF AUSTERITY: GREECE (Giardini) A homeless forager of metal scraps hits pay dirt when he finds discarded paper flowers made of euros. An art dealer discovers the forager’s abandoned cart and sells it to a senile artist/collector with a penchant for making paper flowers. The collector creates a bouquet of paper flowers out of euros that she bags and discards. The trenchant irony in Stefanos Tsivopoulos’s three-channel video History Zero lays bare the relativity of value.

A TREE FALLS: BELGIUM (Giardini) Berlinde De Bruyckere found a tree in France and shipped it to Belgium, where she remade it in wax. It lies in the Belgian pavilion, patched with bandages like a human body and lit delicately by a skylight covered in distressed fabric. The South African novelist J.M. Coetzee collaborated with his story, “The Old Woman and the Cats,” published for the first time in the catalogue. 

Photos by Paola Ferrario.

IT’S ALIVE: NORDIC PAVILION (Giardini) In the immersive multi-media installation Mirrors of e/den, Finnish artist Terike Haapoja materializes the invisible, presenting a sound track of the photosynthesis of trees in an on-site garden, and floor-projected videos of colored heat waves in the bodies of newly dead animals. Other oddly seductive displays include decomposing leaves and extreme close-ups of facial bacteria.

Photos by Paola Ferrario.

ACT OF CONSCIENCE: LEBANON (Arsenale) In a true-life story poetically inflected via architecture and text, Akram Zaatari’s poignant video installation Letter to a Refusing Pilot addresses the act of an Israeli soldier who refused to bomb a school during the Lebanese Occupation of the early ’80s.

Akram Zaatari’s contribution is curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath.