DRAWING ◈ PAINTING ◈ ESSAYS ◈ SCULPTURE ◈ VIDEO ◈ CV/BIO
Shori Sims (b. 1999, they) is a transdisciplinary artist who repositions the hauntedness of the West as a consequence of settler-colonial pillage and imagines how we might use the power of contemporary media to exorcise these temporal demons. Their work is a rebuttal to the idea of a “lost future,” and instead imagines our present and future hauntedness as a result of the Black body’s inability to forget the traumatic past and present. Through their utilization of the body as a set of markers for time and space, Shori challenges the viewer to reassess historical “humanist” thought as inherently flawed and in need of deconstruction and rebuilding. By their use of archetypal yet invented spaces, Shori speaks to a reified construction of architecture, too, as a body and thus containers of our past and future histories. Their installations, as they engage media as sculptural-object, serve as atemporal evidence of a past-future free from codified social constraints (hierarchy). Their work highlights Blackness’ fundamental opposition to contemporary power structures as the key to realizing this: a utopic vision of a future in which the relational dynamic of “slave” and “human” (or such a dynamic by any other name) could not exist.
EDUCATION
2022 BFA, Fine Arts, Carnegie Mellon University
2024 MFA, Sculpture, Rhode Island School of Design
(he/they)
shorisms@gmail.com