Xaviera Simmons, an outspoken critic of a society that still cannot rid itself of systemic racism, engages her sweeping practice of photography, painting, video, sound, sculpture, and installation to explore the construction of landscape, language, and complex histories in the United States and wherever its empire-building influence is felt around the globe.
Her black-and-white wood-paneled language installations attempt to engage the viewer in a space beyond the speculation of coded behavior to create a quasi-literary environment that details history, mythology, archival materials, and her own personal collections. Amplifying the scale of repeated text to that of a photograph or painting, Simmons invites us to participate in a collective, problematizing read: how does memory toggle our perception of reality? And, more explicitly, what (or whose) memories are coded into history?
In her most recent large-scale projects, poster actions, and installations, she explores the cycle of exploding social violence and simultaneous political apathy that also characterizes debates about white supremacist violence, civil rights, and democracy in America. Simmons’s work was recently featured in the exhibition Crisis Makes a Book Club at the Queens Museum in New York.
