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Impossible Objects
By Nate Lippens
Todd Simeone creates impossible objects. On the occasion of his first solo exhibition at James Harris Gallery, the artist conjures up the tradition of the readymade, initiated by Marcel Duchamp and transformed by postwar artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, who in 1959 famously declared: "Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. I try to act between the two."
For Simeone, an artist situated in another time of war and the precariousness of late capitalism, "between the two" is a no-brainer. In fact, that interstitial space is where his handsomely spare and tartly funny work thrives.
His first post-BFA solo exhibition at Crawl Space was titled From A to A. It was a witty take on Warhol's book From A to B and Back Again and the limitations that double as freedom. It's from another alphabet altogether — The Story of O — but sometimes the bound hand is its own kind of freedom.
Simeone works in diverse mediums such as digitally altered photographs, drawings, and sculpture to engender and explore how the random and mundane create meaning, the construction of space and time, and the mutability of forms.
A piece in a group show at Crawl Space titled The Physical Impossibility of Life from the Head of Someone Dead was a nifty reference to Gabriel Orozco's deflated soccer ball and a hilarious jab at mortality and its discontents.
For A Difference of Outlines and Outcomes, the beautifully installed exhibition features a winnowed-down product (Harris has a genius for these kind of spare, smartly conceived shows as seen in solo turns by Tania Kitchell and Claude Zervas). There are two large photos, a lightbox, and a series of drawings. The large-scale photos continue Simeone's product displacement, taking an object (a check, a gameboard) and through a series of digital erasures, removing the telltale details for a streamlined look that is at once familiar and strange.
"Express Box (extra large – smashed flat)"
Ultrachrome Inkjet
© Todd Simeone 2006
Image Courtesy James Harris Gallery
His Express Box (extra large – smashed flat) is a photograph of a FedEx shipping box, flattened and with all signage on it removed except the orange and white arrows. They are pointers directing to the edges of denuded product.
A Plan for a Plan is a blueprint stripped of all detail except the outlines of walls, creating a haunted house, at once formally pleasing and emotionally bereft.
The light box is deeply satisfying with its subtle wallpaper pattern rendered as etched ivy on a blazing white background. It's controlled growth with product placement; the FedEx arrows appear amidst the filigreed tangles.
The encounter it facilitates is at once restricted and open-ended. The objects are the objects on the one hand, and on the other they transcend themselves.
These disequlibriums at the heart of Simeone's post-readymades are fundamental to his art; they slide easily into the elusive space in between life and art.
