The New Yorker:

Simpson’s wryly evasive photos, films, collages—and now paintings—peel back the layers of our looking.

By Julian Lucas

Lorna Simpson found the meteorite on eBay. “It was for a great price,” she told me, declining to give the exact figure, though she later admitted that it had cost about six thousand dollars. The seller was “some guy upstate” who’d never listed anything comparable and provided no proof of its celestial provenance. But when it was finally delivered—to her airy studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where I’d come to see her on a February afternoon—magnets clung to its dimpled surface. “I’ve got this idea—it’s meteorites! ” she mimed telling her gallery, Hauser & Wirth, affecting the voice of an exuberant naïf. Simpson knit her eyebrows: “They were, like, ‘O.K.’ ” She began screen-printing photos of meteorites onto fibreglass panels, then painted over them in silvery hues. Last November, she exhibited the results in a show called “Earth & Sky,” placing the meteorite itself in a corner of the gallery.

Simpson is contemporary art’s astronomer of the archives, always searching for the dark matter that “documentary” images conceal. This most recent suite was inspired by a photo of a meteorite in an antique geology textbook, whose caption described its near-collision with an unnamed sharecropper in nineteen-twenties Mississippi. His strange destiny—chosen by the heavens, erased by Jim Crow—obsessed her. Now a work from the series has been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and will feature in its retrospective of Simpson’s paintings later this month.

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