Charlie Chaplin’s Cabin, and Western Mythologies, Teeter on the Edge at Cookie Factory

“For me, it’s important that the work unfolds over time and as you sit with it, it starts to reveal other aspects of itself or issues that it’s dealing with,” Gary Simmons shared with me over a Zoom call from his home in Los Angeles, speaking of his current solo exhibition, Rush, at Denver’s Cookie Factory.

The artist, who has been working in various media for over three decades, is perhaps best known for his signature technique of mark making directly on walls and blackboards then partially erasing the image—rendering it blurred, ghostly, and existing at an intersection of presence and disappearance. In Rush, Simmons creates large-scale, site-specific wall drawings that envelop the former industrial space, using filmic references and Western iconography to address histories of violence realized through Western expansion and the dispossession of Indigenous lands in the so-called American Southwest.