Simone Bailey is an artist who utilizes sculpture, performance, site specific installation, and video in her practice. Her work is an interrogation of disembodied poetics and the impulse to grasp the intangible. Her practice focuses on perception, process, music, hybridity, ephemerality, desire, violence, surrogate bodies, and the impossible, all while maintaining an intimate proximity to blackness.
Simone’s work has been exhibited at Mass MoCA, The Museum of the African Diaspora, Southern Exposure, The Lab, Armory Center for the Arts, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among other venues. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, Art Omi, and Vermont Studio Center. She received both an MFA in Fine Arts and an MA in Visual & Critical Studies from California College of the Arts. She also earned a BFA in Filmmaking from San Francisco Art Institute.
My artwork is an interrogation of the disembodied poetic.
An investigation of the impulse to grasp the intangible.
A focus on perception, process, music, hybridity, ephemerality, desire, violence, surrogate bodies, and the impossible.
The above is accomplished while maintaining an intimate proximity to blackness.
Violence is the most frequently recurring theme in my work. I honed in on violence because it is the most powerful medium I have ever known. Violence, as I see it, operates as a medium akin to painting, sculpture or photography: it is a tool for disseminating and directing culture. It is consciously and actively used to shape our perceptions of reality and what is possible. My work often appropriates tools of violence to reflect upon cultural violences and draw a sense of empowerment from symbols that have been and are being used to subjugate and facilitate systemic oppression. Referencing systemic, institutional, and social violences is necessary to reflect upon and challenge painful, objectifying, dehumanizing experiences that continue to shape black life today because our culture was formed by and continues to persist in defiance of those violences.
