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Alette Simmons-Jimenez
I love experimenting with materials and found objects and I am known for creating artworks in a broad range of media. I relish equally making marks in wet paint or the sudden unexpected beauty achieved in pouring or dripping paint; weaving, hammering, or sawing, and the physicality of creating 3 dimensional constructions. I prefer to work with everything all at once, sometimes juxtaposing one style on another on another, all in the same canvas. Painting one day leads to an idea in video the next, and maybe sketches for a sculpture the next.
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As a young woman my grandmother made a living designing and sewing dresses for rich, society women in Chicago. I remember playing with my dolls under a huge structure, set up in her special room, where she created beautiful hand-stitched quilts. My mother was an accomplished painter and later a successful interior designer. My father spent his free time in the dark room or at the wood turning lathe filling the house with all sort of odd furniture. At the age of six months my family was off to Italy where I began a lifestyle of comings and goings, between cities and countries, never staying anywhere very long. My father was a career military man that kept us on the move, constantly packing and unpacking. My life is like a quilt of different cultures and influences.
I am interested in transformations: from found objects, recycled materials, other peoples junk into high art, from sculpture into painting, from freedom into containment. I am always photographing or collecting shapes and forms from nature – a shell, a bird, a cloud, or a bug. In the studio I’ll sketch contours and combine bits and pieces. These new forms work their way into my world of whimsical allegory, imagery that mixes the abstract and the real, the absurd and the serious.
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