Opening Reception: Wednesday June 22, 6–8 PM
The Kitchen is pleased to present CODED, an exhibition of works by Xaviera Simmons featuring new and recent photographic, audio, video, text-based sculptural work, and ultimately a movement-based performance. Her dynamic, interdisciplinary approach to art-making is rooted in an ongoing investigation of experience, memory, and present and future histories, specifically focusing on shifting notions surrounding landscape and character, as well as conversations between formal processes.
With CODED, Simmons continues to mine art historical sources, Internet media, and archival images, in this case as they relate to queer history, homoerotic imagery as well as Jamaican dancehall culture, to construct a new, cohesive conceptual territory. Simmons’s particular vocabulary of movement, reference, sense, text, breath, sound, and image offers ways of looking at mapping, sexuality, gender, pleasure, and sensuality in a queer context and in an island context. The exhibition is the foundation for a unique choreographic score for the forthcoming performance work. Through the sensual, through movement, her works push towards a committed practice of visual freedom.
Curated by Matthew Lyons.
CODED is made possible with support from Jerome Foundation and in part by public funds from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo, and from many individual contributions.
Image Credit: Xaviera Simmons, “Landscape (2 Women)” [detail], 2007. Courtesy of the artist and David Castillo Gallery.
