Current Exhibition -

Sheri Simons

June 3rd - June 27th

Opening Reception:  Thursday, June 3rd, 6-8pm

Gallery IMA is pleased to present a solo show featuring Sheri Simons

Sheri Simons,
Out of Hear (detail),
Wood, 2010
Photo credit: Crystal Keesey

Recent Works
Gallery IMA is pleased to present slant. pause. (repeat), an exhibit featuring Sheri Simons’ site-specific installation of wood, light, and sound.

In 2006, Simons received a six-month fellowship from the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission that allowed her to travel and research the use of portable shrines and festivals throughout Japan. This was a pivotal experience that shifted her thinking and building processes relative to the performative and participatory potential of sculpture. Seeing festivals’ spectacular use of the gigantic and miniature objects to transmit culture invigorated her search for the embedded language within materials.

The works in the show, slant. pause. (repeat), include wooden fabrications that refer to maps, lost-ness, and the continuum of human wandering. These works are arranged with consideration to scale relationships between landscape and sky, cuing the observer to note the choreography of their body in space. A light bulb piece, mommy, works out a notion of a cloyingly invoked over-love with the accompaniment of a looped sound recording. A group of seventy-three small drawings, 73 walks from Tochigi, are made by hacking small, motorized objects and fitting them to hold graphite. They are personal maps of daily walks taken from a rural village in Japan to various destinations throughout the country.

Sheri Simons received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, and has since exhibited widely both nationally and abroad including exhibits at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Craft and Folk Art Museum in San Francisco, the Detroit Institute of Art, the University of Alaska Museum, and the Alaska State Museum among many others. She was awarded the Visual Artist Fellowship Grant by the National Endowment for the Arts and in 2008 was nominated for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Competition Grant. Her public commissions include the Sacramento Central Library, the Carmichael Library in Sacramento and Juvenile Court Area of the Kent County Justice Center through the Seattle Arts Commission. Simons has been featured in several publications such as NYArts Magazine, FIBERARTS Magazine, and Artweek.