OHT Gallery Boston

Previous Exhibits

Blood Relations

Jeannie Simms

June 4 - 26, 2004
Reception: Friday, June 4, 5:30 - 7:30 pm

O·H+T gallery is pleased to present Blood Relations, an exhibition of digitally printed photographs by Jeannie Simms. The exhibition will also include her video Wren's Room in the Project Room.

Jeannie Simms's work is informed by issues of biography and autobiography, in the artist's words, “our passionate urges to describe ourselves.” Her explorations of people and the spaces/lives they create reveal a contemporary world that is increasingly controlled by human values, those molded by economics, beauty, politics, technology, etc. As Simms observes this domestic realm, she reveals the ways in which people both shape and are shaped by their environment.

In Blood Relations, some images are film stills from the video by the same name while others exist only as photographs. The framing of these photographs is meant to exaggerate the architecture of the home and the layout of the furniture, and to expose the psychological dynamic of the home setting. The oblique narrative that unfolds in that setting depicts a family unable to cope with the unexplained absence of the father/husband. Though personal, this domestic drama has a scarily universal feel as the teenage siblings and their nurse mother enact scenes from their life in a tract house on the edge of the Southern California desert. Simms's video, Wren's Room, documents an 11 year-old boy giving a tour of his bedroom. As Wren lists his possessions, he defines himself as an individual in a state of age appropriate flux. His identity shifts depending on the object with which he identifies at the moment: a basketball jersey, his grandfather's hand-made dresser, a fog machine, plastic toy soldiers.

Jeannie Simms commutes between Boston, New York, and Los Angeles. She is a filmmaker and conceptual artist/photographer who has exhibited her work internationally. Her works have screened recently at the Havana Cuba Biennial, the ICA in London, and the MIX festival in New York. She has an MFA from the University of California, Irvine. She teaches at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. This is her first one-person exhibition at O·H+T gallery.