Kristin Simmons “Desperate Pleasures”

Galerie Mourlot

poster for Kristin Simmons “Desperate Pleasures”

This event has ended.

Galerie Mourlot presents Desperate Pleasures, a solo exhibition by New York City artist Kristin Simmons.

A New York City native, Kristin draws inspiration from her experience in a city known for its culture of excess. She explores the conflation and confusion of two languages: the simplicity of a child’s, and the overwrought complexity that exposure to mass media imposes. Simmons explores the insatiable appetite and over consumption of a capitalist society. Finding inspiration through Duchamp’s ‘readymades’ and Warhol’s elevation and Koons’ reincarnation of the ‘readymade’ Simmons uses the internet, books and pop culture to appropriate source images for her work before blending these images with childhood objects and graphics in her studio. Although her work provokes and polarizes, it never moralizes.
Defining herself as a ‘Political Pop Artist,’ with Desperate Pleasures, Simmons presents bold, graphic and colorful works that through a provocative adult lens, explore gun rights, excess, pain and status. Simmons grapples with whether innocence can exist in a hedonistic city. Symbols are tainted; anything appearing benign masks some sort of message related to violence, sexuality, exploitation and/or pain.

The Sucker for Pain series presents colorful images of a needle masked as the popular children’s candy Tootsie Pop. In Bad Habits Simmons examines the influence of packaging and advertising on the viewer, and explores how to and whether we can reconcile childhood innocence after years of capitalist corruption and advertising. The Eggspensive series is a display of Faberge eggs created incorporating 24-karat gold leaf aimed at targeting our culture’s view of fertility treatments as a status symbol. Simmons does not point fingers so much as suggest, and what she suggests is not that adulthood is a banishment from the Eden of childhood but, rather, that there is no Eden from which to be banished.

Kristin Simmons was born and raised in New York City. Simmons received a BA in Studio Art and Art History from Columbia University and is the recipient of several prestigious awards including the Orra White Hitchcock Award for Excellence in the Arts and The National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts Award. Simmons lives and works in New York City.

Please join the conversation with Galerie Mourlot on Twitter (@mourlotart), Facebook (@GalerieMourlot), Instagram (@mourlotart) via the hashtags #GalerieMourlot and with the artist via Instagram (@kristinsimmonsart) #KristinSimmons #DesperatePleasures #ksoriginalart

Media

Schedule

from October 20, 2017 to November 25, 2017

Opening Reception on 2017-10-19 from 18:00 to 21:00

Artist(s)

Kristin Simmons

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