Interview

An Interior Biography – by DM Simons

Images and words are the stuff of history spilling into clichés. It is the cliché not the image, not the picture that reverberates, that echoes the traffic of history, the freighted footprint of our existence. The mining of the cliché, excavating it as representation, as picture—co-opting it, infusing it with an urgent agency.
Revitalizing it’s tenants—history, popularity, repetition, myth—rents the cliché as we understand it, and it’s purpose outside and separate from comfort of it’s couching not as familiar or non threatening but edgy unsure, captivating. With use the cliché becomes it’s cliché.
Using images, be it photographs or film stills (Still-life) tells a better story or at least an interesting one. The manipulation of fragments, of feelings, of thoughts rent mute is the gist of our interior selves as story. Pictures, singularly or in juxtaposition with others act like a mise en scene. It is not what is seen but what is suggested that is the condition, the echo of it’s own cliché. A clarity of intent obscured, filtered, suggests an enigmatic reading. Images occupy the fragile working place of memory/imagination. Agitating this cleavage between thought and action develops the inchoate into something like an identity, like an understanding though fleeting. My work is a representation of a representation, an acknowledgement of the cliché and sharing with the past, with the present and future.

Sol’Sax was born in Kings County Hospital in 1969. In the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s Sol’Sax grew up in Bushwick on Halsey Street except for four years to attend High school in Leonia New Jersey in the eighties. He still lives and works in Brooklyn N.Y.

He received a BFA with honors from The Cooper Union in 1992 and a MFA with honors from Yale School of Art in 1995, he also studied abroad in Berlin the year the Berlin wall fell. Since 1990 Sol’Sax has produced objects, images and performances that fuse African-American cultural heritages like Hip Hop, House, Reggae, Soul, Jazz, Blues and spirituals with traditional African religions like Yoruba, Congo, Mende, Akan and Fon.

Over the last twenty years Sol’Sax has received some notable honors in sculpture. In 2005 he received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture. In 2004 he received Guggenheim Fellowship in Sculpture. In 2001 he was awarded a public commission by MTA arts for transit and designed 16 permanent glass panel designs in The Halsey Street Subway station. In 1996 he was a resident at Socrates Sculpture Park. He was the first artist to be given a solo show at Rush Arts and has exhibited at The Brooklyn Museum, The Queens Museum, The Museum of the City of New York, The Studio Museum in Harlem, P.S. 1 MoMA, Sculpture Center and the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles among other venues.

William J. Simmons is Provost Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Southern California and Mellon Fellow in Women’s History at the New-York Historical Society.

Simmons did his BA at Harvard University and spent three years at the Graduate Center, CUNY and taught at the City College of New York.

His criticism and essays have appeared in numerous periodicals and books internationally.