Arthur Simms, Sexual Tension, 1992. Image courtesy of Karma.

View on The New Yorker

The tradition of sculptural assemblage departs from the proposition that things are inasmuch as they are together. The Jamaican-born sculptor Arthur Simms takes this notion to its maximum tension: found objects are bound together by dense skeins of rope that resemble mycelial networks or unusually thick cobwebs. Though the rope suggests tidy metaphors of unity, coherence, and formal integrity, a playful but insistent messiness effloresces in Simms’s entanglements, throwing any seeming wholeness into question. Among the objects pulled together by the ropes are kids’ scooters and bikes, liquor bottles, toys: elements of childish nostalgia and adult revelry alike that charge the sculptural bodies with a rambunctiousness that refuses containment.