Lorraine Simms: Dedication
McBride Contemporain is proud to announce Dedication, the second solo exhibition at the gallery by Montreal-based artist Lorraine Simms. Long admired as a multidisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses drawing, sculpture and painting, Simms was nonetheless a painter first and foremost, recognized and celebrated as such. In recent years, her work moved away from the medium of oil and took firm root in drawing, deepening her artistic exploration of that fundamental medium in a project of profound investment - rendering in pencil the cast shadows of the preserved remains, primarily the bones, of extinct and endangered animal species. This body of work engrossed the artist for several years, moving slowly and meticulously, producing quietly spectacular, haunting results. She illuminated the beauty, the strangeness, the sorrow, and the mystery of these creature’s remains, subtly highlighting a conservationist perspective and celebrating nature’s extraordinary range and richness, all while reminding us of our shared mortality.
And then in her own life, Simms encountered a series of highly difficult experiences, including losing her parents and herself becoming seriously ill. During and after her convalescence, she noticed a powerful and moving tendency to emotionally drill down on and into everyday behaviours, repetitive acts of normalcy that illness often reveals as immanent and endless when considered more closely than we often tend to. The simplest of necessary motions and actions, like washing one’s face, doing the dishes, keeping track of the time, took on an unexpected importance and depth. During this period, she had been given bouquets of flowers and plants and had saved them out of a personal - and artistic - sense that they were of special meaning to her.
And that was when, and partially why, painting returned. Something chimed for Simms in considering the slow act of repetitive mark-making with paint and doing and experiencing those types of quotidian actions that had come to her heightened awareness. She’d been given a sense of the preciousness of living, and the uncanny but recuperative sense of going through our daily motions, and ambitiously wanted, simply, to paint that. Painting became a must again - painting an image, but in a manner that can be described as “abstract”, repeating a motif to the edge, all-over style while fusing figure and ground. The flora that she had been saving, embodying the powerful ideas and emotions she had experienced, became the subject, painted from life. The resulting paintings, made in luminous oil colour on supports of different scale, stand as quiet monuments to focus and realization, to sensitization and to healing.
Lorraine Simms has exhibited her paintings and drawings across Canada and the U.S. Her work was shown in institutions like the Canadian Museum of Nature (Ottawa), Redpath Museum (Montréal), and the Beaty Museum of Biodiversity (Vancouver). She has participated in residencies at MASS MoCA (Massachusetts), the American Museum of Natural History (New York) and the Symposium de Baie-Saint-Paul. Her work is in prestigious corporate and museum collections, including the Musée des beaux-arts de Baie-Saint-Paul et le Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec.
