Sanford Biggers: Matter AND Xaviera Simmons: Index Seven

About

Sanford Biggers' Matter collaborates with the cultural legacy of Laocoon, occupying the floor of David Castillo Gallery with this sculptural installation. The work is rendered in vinyl and lays partially deflated on his generous belly, arms at his sides, rump in the air, and head turned with one ear pressed to the earth. Like Laocoon's multiple and often contradictory stories from classical literature, the present work speaks to death, character assassination, and a general loss in trust.

Another formidable artwork in Matter constitutes a mounted 10-foot quilt inscribed with the word "MATTER." The quilt posits a direct connection to the Black Lives Matter movement. The quilt- itself sewn from several antique quilts that signal the role this medium played in antebellum folk art and in Underground Railroad communication networks- lends trans-historical perspective to #blacklivesmatter and the ways in which racism, nationalism, and capitalism have failed that mattering. The materiality of the quilt emphasizes the matter in mattering. Biggers reminds the viewer how terribly powerful it is to have a body, be embodied, be subjected to form. These works also remind us how terribly dangerous that subject-hood and subjectivity are, so intimate and intimately produced by bodies physical, historical, geographical, cultural, semiotic.

In Xaviera Simmons' Index Composition photographs, signifier and signified are partitioned on these expressive figures by a bolt of fabric sheathing their upper halves, creating the sensation of two continents.  In Simmons' figures, objects and images found, borrowed, and possessed by the artist accumulate with the sculptural density of forest canopies: totems and trophies; raffia and lace; Polaroids and clippings; rings and clothespins; dried kelp and coconut skin; feathers and reeds; fruits and fetishes; gourds, nets, baskets, braids.

The subaltern speaking from the photographic documentation of Index Seven advocates accountability to public histories, social relations, and the production of difference. This body of work constructs sculptures inside of photographs, using the language of sculpture in an image and creating a cinematic landscape inside of the image.

If Laocoon invites meditation on the entropy of identity- perhaps under the weight of hegemony, perhaps under localized contestations, perhaps in preparation for rebirth- Simmons' interventions upon full portraiture stand upright like architectural columns, the other in a nuanced movement toward orientating attention outside of consumption and appropriation. As imminent fictions, a carte blanche, Matter and Index Seven stand in the dividual, the diaspora, the vibrations that move all matter, the vibrations that matter.

Sanford Biggers' many solo exhibitions both nationally and internationally, include the Brooklyn Museum, SculptureCenter and MASS MoCA. Among his upcoming solo exhibitions are Subjective Cosmology at MOCAD, Detroit (2016) and Massimo de Carlo Gallery, Milan (2016) and group exhibitions including School of the Art Institute, Chicago's 150th Anniversary Show and The Freedom Principle curated by Naomi Beckwith and Dieter Roelstraete, now traveling to the ICA Philadelphia (2016).  Biggers will participate in a Conversations panel at Art Basel Miami Beach this December.  His work has been included in venues worldwide including Tate Britain and Tate Modern in London, the Whitney Museum and Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, as well as institutions in China, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Poland and Russia. The artist's works have been included in notable exhibitions such as: Prospect 1 New Orleans Biennial, Illuminations at the Tate Modern, Performa 07 in NY, The Whitney Biennial, and Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem. His works are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum and Bronx Museum, among many others.

Xaviera Simmons' work will be on view in the upcoming NO MAN'S LAND: Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection as well as in the UBS Lounge at Art Basel Miami Beach. Among her many group exhibitions currently on view are Reality of My Surroundings: The Contemporary Collection at the Nasher, Durham and Philodendron: From Pan-Latin Exotic to American Modern at the Wolfsonian Museum, Miami Beach. The artist received her BFA from Bard College (2004) after spending two years on a walking pilgrimage retracing the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade with Buddhist Monks. She completed the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program in Studio Art (2005) while simultaneously completing a two-year actor-training conservatory with The Maggie Flanigan Studio. Simmons has exhibited nationally and internationally where major exhibitions and performances include: The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, The Studio Museum In Harlem, The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, The Public Art Fund, and The Sculpture Center. Selected solo and group exhibitions include Archive As Impetus at The Museum Of Modern Art; Underscoreat The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum; and Radical Presence at The Studio Museum in Harlem among many others. Her works are in major museum and private collections including Deutsche Bank, UBS, The Guggenheim Museum, The Agnes Gund Art Collection, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Studio Museum in Harlem, ICA Miami, and Perez Art Museum Miami.