This past Saturday, Rose B. Simpson gave an artist’s talk at the de Young. Her pueblo-arts-infused lowriders have captured the attention of the art world using a specific sleight of hand: making something different so good that it feels like it always belonged.
“I'm going to do something new for me,” she said when she began from the podium. “I'm going to talk about art and ecology.”
She gave herself a pep talk about why it's ok to try something when you don't know how it's going to go. Not that she hadn’t planned it all carefully. But she knew she was taking a risk and acknowledged the fear.
Her speech was part incantation.
“Relational aesthetics,” she said, “is a reason to get up in the morning.” This is as much a Rose B. statement as her exhibition, LEXICON, in which she intentionally brings two art cultures together in one place.
She pulled up a vase with a geometric pattern onto the screen.
“I'm not going to tell you what this means,” she said. “I'm going to ask you to feel it.”
One could easily interpret power and energy and something strong in the work -- the bold lines, the black color, the clear edges, and the hard corners. But in her work, and in this vase, she reveals no ambivalence. Her practice is to ask you if you feel that way about anything.
Her work is a challenge, not just because it's not the kind of subject that you usually see in contemporary exhibits, but because it showcases a much higher level of care.
Was it surprising to me that she included photos of her mother and her mother's work, or to learn that sculpting came from her maternal line? It was not. Was I shocked to hear her say that having her own daughter made her grow up in a way she might not have otherwise?
Also, not really.
Mothering taught me what it is like to care for something with your whole body, she said at one point. 100% me too.
Still, I worried when on the same weekend I read an article about Sally Man in the Times, which is crazy to worry about having some relationality with a totally successful and controversial artist, when one writes a small column semi-regularly from their own bedroom, but she’s so obsessive, so procedural with her work. It really scared me. How does one know the difference between discipline and robotics? Rose B. would and did say that the answer is love.
Her love came out most when she talked about stripping the cars down to nothing and then rebuilding them back up again and how she did unconventional things the motors and the bodies that I didn't quite understand, and how she called her car Maria and how Maria likes to do this and not that and how you could tell she was entirely identified with this thing that she made.
But where, one might ask, did that identification come from? How does she know she is like the car, which is like the pueblo vessels she studied with geometrical patterns?
“There are some things I'm going to reveal and some things I won't,” she said, alluding to spiritual aspects that were only for certain audiences.
Indigenous dancers from the Karuk Brush Dance Group gave an introduction with a similar message that same afternoon. People of all ages wore traditional clothes and performed a religious dance to welcome new contemporary pieces into the Arts of Indigenous America collection. The person who spoke for the group said that they had received permission to do this dance, though it was sacred and usually done to ceremonially send energies of healing from the community to a sick child.
Rose B. also talked of energetic transfers between her mother's art and her art, and the way she once saw life in the vases made by her mother. On the presentation screen, she had the photo up of these gray pots with small openings at the top. She said she had taken the photo not because she thought the pots themselves were so great but because she saw that the objects had mouths and were clearly breathing. She put a photo of her own sculpture, more figurative, on the screen next to her mother's pot and then explained how she went home and saw that her own work was breathing.
What of the rich, empty people (asked a man during the Q&A), who end up buying your work? The artist could have easily said, No one would ask a man that, but she didn't.
Instead, she said, "I don't know what's going on in the mind of that person at 3 am when they wake up to pee," and then she said her work had a presence and contained a full journey (my words) that may or may not have an impact on the person who bought it. And she wasn't unsure about that. As for selling out, she said she is learning that she needs to take care of herself and that if she doesn't, she can't do her work. It's as simple as that.
The second person in the Q&A asked whether the artist could say more about the inner child, and the little girl in herself, whom the artist said she intentionally holds.
And how do you have the confidence to include art as a form of self-care?
The artist answered that her whole childhood, her mother was always yelling out - Rosie, where are my scissors, and of course, it was true that she had them. I remember those scissors. In my case, they were the orange-handled large ones that were the sharpest in the house, the only ones that cut fabric. And I had them too.
As for including art as an act of self-care, she just said: “I experience a deep satisfaction in accomplishing something I didn’t think I could do.”