did time elapse

Since the start of her career, Lorna Simpson has mined visual and textual material from lifestyle magazines, historical collections, and image libraries to produce her work across multiple media. Reconfiguring these archival materials, she questions their objectivity and grants them new meaning. Since 2014, Simpson has incorporated found images into paintings that dynamically collide representation and abstraction by screen-printing digital collages onto panels then treated with washes of ink or acrylic to achieve a variety of surface effects.

did time elapse features a meteorite reproduced in an encyclopedia of minerals, enlarged to monumental scale; it is one of a series of works on this subject that the artist produced in 2024. A text found within a 1929 Smithsonian Institution manual titled Minerals from Earth and Sky partly inspired the series. It describes a meteorite that fell on the property of a white landowner, Mr. Allen Cox, in Mississippi but was discovered by a Black tenant farmer on the land, who is unnamed in the report. The racial signaling within this eyewitness account captured Simpson’s curiosity. Her associated group of paintings revolves around the meteorite, the object that conditions the encounter between the two men. (Simpson’s research later recovered the farmer’s name: Ed Bush).

Here, the artist moves away from the vibrant color of her previous work for a two-tone palette of black and silver, hues that evoke not only the iron-studded rock but also the photographic process from which the image of the meteorite derived. The artist enhances the rock’s indentations and contours by hand and creates organic veils of paint by dragging, pushing, or tipping the medium onto the surface. The result is a painting that insinuates itself into the viewer’s space by virtue of its scale and the sensory encounter that it invites. Beautiful and terrifying, it asks us to consider the power of unseen forces that shape our lives.