GARY SIMMONS

Since the late 1980s, Gary Simmons has been internationally recognized for using erasure as both a material process and a conceptual strategy. Widely noted for his unconventional use of the blackboard, Simmons brings it into the exhibition space as a kind of ready-made, drawing with chalk and partially erasing it by hand. Born in 1964 in New York and of West Indian descent, he draws on popular culture—cartoons, music, sports, and cinema—to expose systems of racial and social oppression.

By exposing how narratives are built—and what is omitted—Simmons offers a renewed reading of history, a liberated vision of the future, and a rejection of imposed identities. His aim is not to correct history, but to reveal its absences—to make space for other narratives, other futures, other memories.

With Rush, Simmons enters into dialogue with Colorado’s history. Invoking its role as a corridor to the West, he engages the American trope of Manifest Destiny and westward expansion. The exhibition title nods to Charlie Chaplin’s film The Gold Rush—reflecting how American mythology has long nurtured ideals of urgency, hope, success, and expansion—while centering on two persistent symbols of the American frontier: the cabin and the covered wagon, drawn from both the Donner Party and Chaplin. Transforming the main gallery into a vast blackboard, Simmons immerses visitors in an environment that surrounds them like a cinema. Rush also alludes to the hurried gesture of his hand erasing chalk—urgent yet incomplete movements that metaphorically erase histories while leaving traces that resist disappearance.

Shooting stars also appear—on canvas, across the exterior wall mural, and in this small work. They point to the mythology of ambition, success, and dreams, but also to impermanence and fragility—enigmas that flare and fade like memories, wishes captured or missed, or like flyposted images left to deteriorate in the open air. In Simmons’s hands, stars become both symbols of aspiration and reminders of erasure.

For the first time, Simmons introduces sepia tones into his wall drawings. Sepia conjures nostalgia, yet here it contrasts with the grim history of the Donner Party and the absurdity of Chaplin, infusing the works with irony. It is also the color of fictional time, signaling not just history but its fabrication. Simmons prompts reflection on how narratives are constructed in an age of acceleration and post-truth. While images once took years to fade into sepia and enter the archive, on social media they become ruins the moment they appear. Everything fades instantly to sepia.