Ikkan Art Gallery presents Extant Phantoms, an exhibition of early work by widely acclaimed American artist, Gary Simmons. This is the first solo presentation of his works in Singapore.

Extant Phantoms features some of Simmon’s first chalk drawings on blackboards done in the artist’s “erasure” technique, not seen since its presentation at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC in 1994. The chalkboard and its history as a tool for disseminating knowledge become an investigative site into how ideas about race are deeply embedded in the structures of our academic and cultural institutions.

Addressing personal and collective histories of race and class, Disinformation Supremacy Board interrogates educational hegemony and prevailing notions of white supremacy in pedagogy while Simmon’s early Erasure drawings appropriate from vintage cartoons and mass culture to highlight the role of televised media in perpetuating racial stereotypes. From the crows of Disney’s “Dumbo” to Honey in Looney Tunes’ “Bosko”, Simmons explains that he wanted to show “how we can attempt to erase the stereotype, but the image won’t easily go away, it persists”.

The inherent performative nature of the Erasure drawings and its ghostly gestural marks maintain visual allure that seduces while challenging the viewer, eliciting personal childhood memories and summoning it to the realm of the political:

“We are all haunted by the past and by longing. A ghost is a presence you feel but cannot see. It’s the hidden element in the room, the mental traces that are always with us: personal experiences, fantasies, perceptions or world events. My work, in general, comes from the memories of events and images that I, and I imagine others, are haunted by.” Gary Simmons in Conversation with Okwui Enwezor, Gary Simmons: Paradise, 2012, Damiani Press

About the artist:

Gary Simmons (b. 1964), lives and works in New York City. He graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and completed an MFA at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. Simmons’ work has been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Studio Museum of Harlem, New York; Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis; the Rubell Family Collection, Miami; the Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.

-Ikkan Art International

Image: © Gary Simmons
Courtesy of the artist and Ikkan Art International