Sudden Places: Recent work by Chloë Simmons and Tom Lang

December 8 – January 12, 2024
Opening Reception, Friday, December 8, 6–8 pm

“It is memory that solders together the processes, scattered across time, of which we are made. In this sense we exist in time…. To understand ourselves means to reflect on time. But to understand time we need to reflect on ourselves”. - Carlo Rovelli

 Over the course of the last year Lang and Simmons sporadically sent each other letters and other forms of correspondence through the mail. Tom Lang sent two books: Tender Buttons by Getrude Stein and The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli that functioned as guides to the development of their individual work. The title of the show, Sudden Places comes from Stein’s cubist text from 1917, an era not unlike our own. The book is broken up into three parts, “Objects”, “Food”, and “Rooms”. Stein describes everyday domestic objects and breaks them down through language; the poetry attempts to “create a word relationship between the word and the things seen.”In this exhibition, objects and images coalesce, finding the unfamiliar in the familiar as each artist touches on the notions of time, memory, and place through their work. Flowers appear in the work of both artists.

 Tom Lang is Emeritus Professor at Webster University in St Louis. His Studio is behind his Oak Street house which has very few right angles. He believes that the true poet puts the burnt matches back in the box. In every discarded or worn remnant, there is a narrative, lessons to be learned or an enigma. His work, like his life, is a collage of the familiar and the unrehearsed. Although each piece has a unique and specific source, and might speak of sudden place, they all follow a similar path of process. They could be seen as shadows of paintings but they continue to be aesthetically suspicious. Tom has retired from teaching, however he is in his studio nearly every day. He now also has a studio in southwest France and has conducted numerous workshops, lectures, and demonstrations in the U.S. and abroad and his work has been exhibited throughout the USA, in Europe, and Japan.

 Chloë Simmons’ sculptural works contemplate domestic spaces and the impact of images on the perception of memory, and time. Appropriated imagery and objects are forcibly held together; smashed between panes of glass and haphazardly sealed and supported by steel epoxy putty. Through video, sculpture, installation, and art objects, her practice embraces failure, low resolution, and the default. Her work navigates what it feels like to be alive right now, questioning the effect of media, and digital technologies on our relationships with ourselves and others. Simmons currently lives and works in Madison, Wisconsin. where she lectures classes in digital and new media at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her video works have been shown locally and internationally in galleries and film festivals while her physical work has been shown throughout the Midwest and United States.