these texts are an archive of my life in the San Francisco Bay Area from march 2007 - march 2015. it stands as a record of close to a decade of my life, charting the struggles i faced as an artist, daughter, and lover. messy and chaotic at times, eloquent and poetic at others, these texts are an index i am proud of. it was here in this electric box that i learned how to be honest about my experiences and the person i needed to become. it was here that i first learned the truism that words make the world and how to trust such a beautiful, rife, hard fact.

thank you for meeting me here in such tall grass.


my artist website is here.

Oct 8, 2010

testing 1 2 3

working on an artist's statement. working, working, working.

i am a very wordy girl.

...


I am a thief. My practice is an evidence room.

The collections I present are sites that house stolen images, corrupted files, diary entries, favorite books, and family photographs. They are storerooms for the splinters of identity.

One by one, I hold the splinters up. I put them in a line. I shuffle them around. I crop the images, remove the bright colors, and pump up the contrast: I cover my tracks.

And then I allow the flaw of my hand and the imperfection of my eye to have their say. After having stolen, manipulated, and corrupted these images by impersonal digital means, they are finally processed through the body- its urges, desires, fears, pleasures, pains, and past. Digital information undergoes an organic digestion.

In this way, little by little, the ligature of secrecy exposes itself. Little by little, the knot is undone.

But my argument is not rhetorical. Rather it is the building of a heart-felt, insistent, and truthful allegory.

Through the shame-driven act of redaction, a poetics of surprising candor occurs. The collections I present, made up of largely stolen and corrupted individual "evidences", form a thoughtful whole that betray the state of longing itself.

As a thief compelled to act in her own defense, my attempt to hide my crimes exposes my shattered self.

My practice is a piece by piece mapping of the desire for cohesion and stability- the desire for a reckoning.

6 comments:

Radish King said...

I am a thief. My practice is an evidence room.

I just love the hell out of this.

angela simione said...

yay!!!! thank you, sweetie! i know you just went through the horror of the artists's statement too. thank you for liking the opening line. maybe that could be enough! just those two sentences! ha!

Radish King said...

I was thinking the same thing. I mean it's all there. Still that's the hell of the artist statement. They don't love you to be artistic in them. GRRRRRR!!!!!

angela simione said...

for sure! maybe this has a bit too much creative spin on it. i'll keep chipping away at it... get it whittled down to something a bit less Prose-y, i suppose. arg. but i'm glad to know i'm on the right track. and i'm glad to know that pretty much everyone hates writing these things and it isn't just me. ha!

Christine E. Hamm, Poet Professor Painter said...

This is the best artist statement, hell, life statement, ever.

angela simione said...

christine!!!! thank you!!!!!

i don't think my first response went through- what a high compliment! and that gives me the self-assurance to keep pushing forward and see where i end up. thank you so much! :)