NAME: angela simione
BIRTH PLACE:
BIRTH DATE: 9.3.80
BIOGRAPHY
Artist Statement:
Looking at a redacted document is a strange experience. Enticed to fantasize by traces of the familiar, we begin to investigate; but from the moment our investigation begins, so does our frustration.
The redacted document is erasure and appropriation at once. We know it by what it withholds rather than by what it offers- remnants, the scraps of an identity. We want these scraps to be meaningful, to act as evidence, to whisper the substance of the lost information, to belie its secrets.
In this claimed territory, we feel victimized by the damaged state of the document and are made aware of our status as the untrustworthy Other. We become nostalgic for the unknowable original... we mourn for it. We respond to this secrecy as loss, and we experience this loss as if it were our own.
I am captivated by this occurrence.
But within the trauma of the redacted document, a new context presents itself… a context in which loss, experienced by the Other, may be felt and understood. Using methods of erasure to create my own "redacted" documents, I make metaphors for the experiences of loss. I present fragments, tiny bits of evidence, allusions to a lost history. It is a poetry born of violence, and it is this violence with which my practice is concerned. What remains, in spite of secrecy, is a new document. A new identity has been constructed. A site of new hope emerges where understanding may be possible.
Representation:
HANG Art Gallery, San Francisco
