Gary Simmons
Landmark
Landmark
$375,000
Gary Simmons
Landmark
2008
Pigment, oil paint, and cold wax on canvas
213.4 x 213.4 cm / 84 x 84 in
‘Landmark’ (2008) is part of a larger body of work that takes the 1972 film ‘Conquest of the Planet of the Apes’ as its departure point. The film in turn was inspired by the Black liberation movement of the 1960s and the racial politics of the 1965 Watts Rebellion.
‘In a film the filmmaker is building a narrative that is fluid but if you stop it, freeze a frame and rearrange it by either rewinding or fast-forwarding the image that image is no longer part of the narrative but an autonomous signifier. If I isolate the image, both from its narrative and its broader context, I create a déjà vu and the image becomes iconic, an image that you feel you’ve seen before but cannot place. Memory fights to anchor the image to an experience but it withstands that fight and then the image haunts you.’—Gary Simmons [1]
A large-scale painting, ‘Landmark’ depicts the first two letters of the famed Hollywood sign, a classic Los Angeles icon. The brushstrokes left behind from the action of erasure cause the sign to appear engulfed in smoke and flames — quivering yellow lines shape the sign’s ‘H’ and half of the ‘O’ against a rich black background. Immediately recognizable yet simultaneously disarming and unfamiliar, Simmons reworks the Los Angeles monument into something wholly uncanny through his use of fragmentation, texture and color.
‘We are all haunted by the past and 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 [2]
For over 30 years, Gary Simmons has probed film, architecture, and American popular culture to create works that explore personal and collective experiences of race and class. After Simmons received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and his MFA from Cal Arts in Los Angeles, he established a studio in a former school in New York City. There, he encountered schoolroom objects, which became the material for artworks that addressed racial inequality and institutional racism through the filter of childhood experience. Simmons’ use of pedagogical materials, in particular readymade chalkboards, led to a formal and aesthetic breakthrough that would inform much of his subsequent work, in which the erasure of the image has been a powerful and recurring theme. Simmons’ signature erasure technique is loaded with deep cultural significance. The artist builds up layers of oil, wiping the surface while the paint is still wet to smear the image so that it simultaneously emerges from the canvas and disappears into it.