︎
Mary Simpson

︎ Works
︎ Exhibitions
 ︎ Texts
︎ About
Mary Simpson

︎ Works
︎ Exhibitions
 ︎ Texts
︎ About



Playing off of a cultural shift from boredom to restlessness, and a retreating perspective unencumbered by devices, Off Hours is a paean to looking and gazing, to film, painting, and the supposition of objects holding onto their duration. Painting and filmmaking are two related sides of Simpson’s practice. Upon entering the first floor hallway, two 16mm films are projected—in A Feeling of If (2015), we see Jasper Johns’ Connecticut garden in a succession of meditative, drawn-out shots composed much like Simpson would frame and layer her canvases. In 10,000 Things (16mm, 2015), we’re brought into the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s former New York rehearsal space, Westbeth, where a piano is being prepared for a John Cage score. Peripheral portraits of postmodern forebears, the space of rehearsal, arrangement, and cultivation unfolds.

Continuing into Rachel Uffner’s downstairs space, paintings on canvas and panels surround a large table in the room’s center. Some canvases are vertically scaled to one’s own body, some held heavy with impasto, others expansive and departing in composition. Attempting both image and body, the paintings use architecture, frame, structure and space to exteriorize the gaze, to take back vibration and psychological resonance. The table, inset with collage, functions as dining table and vitrine, playing with masculine and feminine forms as an impossibly flat kunstkammer for the show.