“Art was really my secret love anyway,” Simmons said.
#Real chalkboard professional#
Simmons was on the path to becoming a professional athlete, but after sustaining an injury that prevented him from playing sports, he fully immersed himself in the world of art.
They both came very naturally to me, and I excelled at an early age at that,” Simmons said. “I had two great loves when I was very young: art and playing sports. Even when Simmons was still in school, art was always important to him - it has been a significant part of Simmons’ life since he was a child. Simmons realized that they did not all remember things the same way. Part of what brought the discrepancy of memory to light for Simmons were conversations about school with former classmates. The cafeteria served as a provocative location, due to its role as a “hive of interaction,” Simmons said. His last project used public schools’ cafeteria tables, which he took apart and refabricated parts of, introducing drawings and graffiti-esque imagery. When starting a project, Simmons focuses on places that are hubs of collective memory. “I think we all shape those things in our own experience.” “There are no true actual memories of an event,” he said. The concept of divergent collective memory is a recurring theme in Simmons’ work. Similar to the way that each person sees colors differently, each individual recalls an event in a different way, according to Simmons. “There is no answer that I’m after, but I am trying to set up certain kinds of boundaries for that kind of idea exchange to go on.” “An artist’s job is to really ask tough questions and not so much give the answers - to provide avenues for people to access different issues through their own experiences,” Simmons said. Simmons hopes that his work will spark conversations about memory and interpretations of history. Those traces and those ghosts that are left are kind of blurry.” “I think that stereotypes have certain ghosts that are with us all the time. “It’s really about attempting to erase stereotypes,” Simmons said. In the same way that a chalkboard is rarely truly clean once erased, the legacy of racism is still omnipresent in today’s world. Examining the different cartoon representations, he realized that many of them were quite offensive, although the way that they are remembered varies greatly depending on the audience it is essentially broken down along racial lines, according to Simmons. In his research, Simmons came across a lot of cartoon imagery related to historical events. Simmons first got the idea for the technique while doing research for a film he wanted to make. His signature “erasure technique” touches on the subjective nature of memories and the way that they are - or are not - erased. But it is for Aspen Award of Art recipient Gary Simmons. Looking at a chalkboard - erased, but still marred by the smudges of writing that used to fill it - memory may not be the first thing that comes to one’s mind. Jeffrey Gibson's 'The Spirits Are Laughing' flag.