Without the Body, 2021
Artist Book, 82 pages
11.5 x 9.25 x 1.25 in
(excerpt)
By dismissing the body, Simon considers its duality as both an architecture and an idea, providing a deterritorialized, fluid occupation of signs and meaning that establish a distributed sensibility. The work asks: What is the body? And is it necessary? It offers rousing answers that toy with the very idea of materiality and physical presence to perhaps suggest the answers to these provocative questions are necessarily multifarious and shifting, weaving through the uneasy gaps that distinguish digital and material space to playfully stimulate new perceptual possibilities and ways of being.
In this way the work alternates between admission and refusal of the body, an acknowledgement of its complexity and subjectivity, an agent of ongoing slippages, shifts, and transformations. The work does this by traversing a kind of Möbius strip, extending out and away and returning inward, ad infinitum, to cultivate a pattern for the imaginary, paradoxically aided by material construction.
Natasha Chuk, November 2020
