ARTHUR SIMMS

Arthur Simms (b. 1961, Saint Andrew, Jamaica) is an artist based in Staten Island, New York, whose human-scale assemblage sculptures radiate with poeticism and spirituality. Simms’s sculptures are sourced from found and natural materials, and are often bound with rope or wire. Likewise, his work binds together traditions and modern art historical trajectories: Surrealism’s uses of automatism and disjunction, as well as its reliance on the unconscious, are merged with the folk cultures of Jamaica, America, and Haiti. The resulting entanglements, constructed from materials such as bedsprings, empty bottles, bicycles, and worn-out toys, resonate with narratives of belonging, playfulness, and psychic energy. Simms’s sculpture, rather than feeling like an intervention in space, seems to appear spontaneously, as if by magic, like a creation preordained.