Vida Simon is a multi-media artist and storyteller who splits her time between Montreal and Fogo Island, Newfoundland. She will be presenting An Unusual Pincushion in the Carbon Arc Space at the Khyber ICA (1588 Barrington) on Sunday, June 5 at 7pm.
Simon has projected her drawings in and on storefronts, hotel rooms, rooftops and even a former synagogue, and often plays with extremes of scale, using larger than life projections and drawings or “situating the body in relation to miniature worlds.”
The idea for An Unusual Pincushion came to Simon while she was performing another piece. Instead of following the rabbit down the hole, she stored away what she calls her “idea seed” to be developed into her latest work. “The piece I’ll do at the Carbon Arc will be a projected drawing performance, I’m working with an overhead projector. I’ve been doing live drawing projections for about six years, in all sorts of different contexts,” Simon says. “My work is always in some way site-responsive, and quite improvised, even when I arrive with a particular idea.
Sometimes it is the space which influences me most; other times it could be the energy of the audience, or something that occurs impromptu from the context.”
An Unusual Pincushion plans to hone in on the small parts of a larger piece, to illuminate the artist’s often private process of creation for the viewer. “The impulse is to try to stay with one thing, to allow an image/idea/emotion to thicken through repetition. But with that comes the fragmentation that seems to be part of modern human life,” says Simon. “That’s what I’m curious about exploring: the tensions between wanting to stay with one idea and yet not censoring the others that emerge; between telling one story and allowing open space for the audience to ‘project’ their own stories. I’m interested in the double meaning of ‘projection,’ as in light/image, but also psychological.”
The piece’s unusual title came from an innocent doodle. “I keep a tiny book of titles, combinations of words that inspire me that I can later return to. Then a few weeks ago I was doodling and ended up with this head with pins sticking out of the hat, and those words came back to me, ‘an unusual pincushion,’” says Simon. “I think it has to do with a sort of acupuncture of thoughts, like putting map pins in precise spots.”
This article appears in Jun 2-8, 2011.
