2019.20
Cloudscape
Artist
Lorna Simpson
(Brooklyn, NY, 1960 - )
Title
Cloudscape
Creation Date
2004
Century
early 20th century
Object Type
video
Creation Place
North America, United States
Medium and Support
single-channel video installation, black and white, sound, looped
Credit Line
Museum Purchase, Lloyd O. and Marjorie Strong Coulter Fund in partnership with the New Media Arts Consortium, a collaboration of the art museums at Bowdoin College, Brandeis University, Colby College, Middlebury College, Mount Holyoke College, and Skidmore College
Copyright
This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s
Copyright Terms and Conditions.
Accession Number
2019.20
Lorna Simpson often encourages viewers to derive meaning from the text and image presented in her work. Cloudscape, void of any text or spoken word, lets sound take center stage. In the film, a lone Black man (performed by artist and musician Terry Adkins) whistles a hymn or spiritual while being enveloped in a cloud of fog. The fog ultimately consumes him completely, obscuring him from view. The video then runs backward and forward on a continuous loop. The tune is a segment of a hymn that Simpson found in a nineteenth-century African American songbook. Through the film, Simpson collapses past and present through Adkins’s performance and plays quite literally with time through the reversal and looping of the video. Cloudscape uses the body as a site of memory, production, and cultural preservation, suggesting that the past cannot disappear completely or permanently.