textilis mnēmosynē 
d’Ann de Simone

GALLERY III

January 7–February 5, 2023

Opening reception: Saturday, January 7 from 6–8pm

A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce textilis mnēmosynē, an exhibition of three-dimensional collages by former National Member d'Ann de Simone. The title of the project, textilis mnēmosynē, is itself a linguistic collage: “textile” and “text” come from the same Latin root, texere (to weave), while Mnēmosynē means "memory” and refers to the mother of the Muses in Greek mythology. The work brings together bits of found fabric, often acquired at garage sales and primarily made by women. The collaged textiles re-weave these fragments into a collective narrative, embedded in the text of the art.

Many of the compositional elements of the works—as well as the sourcing methods—come from the artist’s late mother, who also collected materials at garage sales, thrift stores, and estate sales. This method of sourcing plays a central role in the work. To paraphrase the ethnologist Gretchen M. Herrmann, garage sales offer egalitarian spaces where participants, the vast majority of whom are women, exchange goods that reveal the precious remnants of their lives. The countless compositional elements of textilis mnēmosynē contain individual stories which are now largely unknowable—yet indelibly a part of the work.

This new series is created on circular wooden structures stretched with Dacron and which reference embroidery hoops and tondos. The collages are made with a variety of textiles—wool needlework, yarn, antique linens, sequins, and beads—along with painted images on paper, silk, and batik. In contrast with squares or rectangles, these circular picture planes lack stability and are optically charged throughout. The circle resembles a target, focusing the viewer on its center.

Collage is offered here as a useful metaphor for contemporary lives beset by the chaotic intrusion of “information” pasted on our consciousness via the internet. Moreover, as a political and philosophical stance, collage, with its implied rejection of hierarchy and canon, is vital to de Simone’s studio practice. This practice is ruminative, a “means of reconnecting fragmented, marginalized objects, activities, and perspectives,” as the theorist Lucy R. Lippard has said more broadly of collage.

Based in New Haven, CT, and East Lansing, MI, d'Ann de Simone is Professor of Studio Art at Michigan State University and exhibits nationally and internationally. At A.I.R., de Simone is a National Member alumna and participated in the 2017 A.I.R. Gallery at the Kochi Biennale. In 2018 she curated a three-person show at A.I.R., Decadent Illusions. She has had numerous solo exhibitions across the U.S., including at GalleryOneTwentyEight in New York, Choate-Rosemary Hall and the Slater Museum of Art in Connecticut, and last spring at Beverly Street Studio School in Virginia. In 2014, she had a solo exhibition at K12 Gallerie in Bregenz, Austria, and represented this same gallery in a three-person show at the international Art Fair in Dornbirn, Austria.

A native Rhode Islander, de Simone is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, where she was a European Honors Fellow in Rome. After graduating, she attended Brown University, focusing on art history, and obtained a master’s degree in painting and printmaking from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

View the Press Release here.

Photography: Matthew Sherman