The Studio Museum in Harlem

NEW YORK, NY, March 15, 2007 - For nearly three decades, artist, photographer and filmmaker Lorna Simpson has challenged traditional visual media and how they represent the female African-American body. Simpson’s work now on display at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Duet, is a split-screen cinematic representation of many of the themes she has explored in her photos and installations in the past-isolation, escapism and intermingling identities.

“Lorna Simpson is committed to exposing the social invisibility of the black female-the impulse to self-express and the challenges of finding a language for that expression,” says Associate Curator Christine Y. Kim. “Duet is the next step in the development of that language in the way she reworks how we perceive visual compositions.”

“While in a certain sense my work operates within a feminist critique, it’s about negotiating and taking aspects from it that I feel are valuable.” explains Lorna Simpson.

In the Duet installation in the Museum’s mezzanine south gallery, two images are projected onto a single screen, and the border between them becomes an imaginative site for visual and contextual exchange. On one side of the screen, two girls play a duet on the piano, while on the other side, two women talk about memory. As the film develops, the girls and women disappear into the “no space” that glues the two images together. The aural and visual simultaneity of the installation challenges traditional notions of effective communication and re-imagines its characters as parts of a communal identity.

“Duet moves to create a larger dialogue with the language of film by using a split screen, allowing two distinct scenes to play before our eyes and in our heads at the same time,” says Kellie Jones, Associate Professor of Art History at Columbia University. “Duet, like Simpson’s other work, introduces gray into the black-and-white binaries of absence and presence, loss and possession, and the desired and the undesirable.” Through music, dialogue and moving image, this work operates with and within the way we perceive images relationship and narrative.

Duet will be on display from April 11, 2007, through July 1, 2007. This installation of Duet runs concurrently with Simpson’s first mid-career retrospective, on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art from March 1, 2007 through May 6, 2007, and traveling to the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts in Michigan and the Gibbes Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, later this year.

About the Artist

Lorna Simpson is one of the most celebrated artists of her generation. Her groundbreaking work in photography, film and video installation often juxtaposes figure, gesture, narrative and text, challenging conventional notions of identity and racial and gender stereotypes. She attributes an internship in The Studio Museum in Harlem’s Education Department at the age of 18 with informing her own “sense of agency as an artist.” Born in Brooklyn, Simpson received a BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York City and a MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego. She began working in film in 1997. Last year, Simpson was the inaugural recipient of the Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize, which recognizes the achievements of an African- American artist of “great innovation, promise and creativity,” was established by jazz impresario and philanthropist George Wein in memory of his wife Joyce, a Museum Trustee from 1994 until her death in 2005.