"Portraiture doesn't necessarily have to correlate to having this facial expression where there's a reciprocal gaze, as though you know something about the subjects because you can gaze into their eyes. The strategy in my work has been to kind of depersonalize that a little bit. By eliminating that quiet gaze back and forth, it gets the viewer to question, 'Well then, who is the subject?'"
"This is a refusal on my part to provide some monolithic identity, particularly an African American or black identity. All this repetition and reproduction that photography affords can become part of the structure of the pieces. Maybe I am trying to get away from the personalization or the specialty of one single, rarefied image."
"The spectacle of the black figure takes up a lot of space within artistic practice. But that has more to do with the culture that we live in. There is no way, really, to depoliticize race."
| Three quotes from artist Lorna Simpson, in "Absences make her art stronger: Lorna Simpson's portraits have a fresh point of view," Hugh Hart's special to the Los Angeles Times
posted in articles on April 18, 2006 7:36 PM | t (0)
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