Portrait of the Artist from Ages 16-21
Blair Simmons
Portrait of the Artist from Ages 16-21
Blair Simmons
Shown in:  
2123: Naïve Futures
2022
Laptop, cement, water, rocks, dirt
Laptop (with data still on it) cast in hammered and chiseled concrete on a white background. This piece is from my series Archive of Digital Portraits Cast in Concrete. The series has emerged out of my current pedagogy and research-driven practice where I have been exploring themes of technology, queerness, anxiety, pain and labor. This show is both informed and bound by my severe anxiety disorder, chronic pain and migraines. While working, I often need to move both quickly and carefully, in a race against time before my body shuts down. My research process is often overly laborious: collecting soft and hard data; reading and researching; teaching and discussing; making and endlessly iterating. The physical process of making these works mimics the daily pain of work and labor: warping, distorting, grinding and wearing down. This series of pieces is both critical of, and dependent on technology, mirroring the ways technology can be a solution to my chronic pain, and the source of the pain itself.
I dream of seeing this object in the darkest, dustiest corner of a museum archive.
Blair Simmons