Elias Sime Exhibition
James Cohan Gallery
This event has ended.
James Cohan Gallery presents the Ethiopian artist Elias Sime in his New York debut exhibition.
Elias Sime is a collector of thread, buttons, plastic, animal skins, horn, fabric, bottle tops, and electric parts. From these objects he creates expansive collages and sculpture, with much of the material coming from the Addis Ababa open-air market, the Merkato, specifically the Menalesh Tera section—translated as “what do you have?”
Sime is also a collector of histories and vernacular techniques. The methods employed in the stitched canvases and computer-part collages that will comprise his exhibition, range from assemblage to traditional Ethiopian braiding.
Sime’s most recent works from the series Tightrope are made from the discarded innards of computers and machines. Braided wires form tight networks of colorful patterns and dismembered motherboards appear as cityscapes viewed from above. While the parts are formally striking, they also speak to the cost of “progress.” Discarded at the Merkato, the lead-ridden, often toxic materials attest to the pace of disposal as well as the danger posed to countries like Ethiopia, which often absorb the refuse of the first world.
In works on dyed canvas from Sime’s What is Love and Ants and Ceramicists series, stitched yarn coalesces into sweeping abstract forms and shifting color fields. While largely nonrepresentational, the compositions snap into narrative focus with the presence of small insects, often ants or a dung beetles, swept up in the fiber pixels of the hand-stitched yarn. More minimal works become a universe unto themselves with Sime’s abstracted signature, a flattened bottle cap, forming a planet in the macrocosm of the picture plane.
For Sime, the objects he uses are not trash: “I treat them like oil paint, acrylic or clay.” Once struck by an object, Sime will tirelessly collect his chosen material in pursuit of an idea: “The size of my art is determined by the idea behind the composition. If the idea overwhelms me, the size of the work keeps growing until I have said enough.” Moved by each object’s history, the hands through which each object passed, Sime’s work is a history of use and disposal, desire and disregard.
While some emphasize the power and spiritual intensity felt when viewing Sime’s works, others note the figurative and abstract traditions of Ethiopia’s modern history, evident in the objects Sime creates. From social realism—a remnant of Soviet involvement in Ethiopia following the 1974 revolution—to mid-century abstract avant-garde movements imported from the west in the 1950s and 1960s, Sime’s art recycles forms as much as objects.
Media
Schedule
from September 10, 2015 to October 17, 2015
Opening Reception on 2015-09-10 from 18:00 to 20:00