Rose B. Simpson: “Counterculture”
June 18 – November 30, 2022
The Guest House at Field Farm
544 Sloan Road
Williamstown, MA 01267
Counterculture open this June at Field Farm in Williamstown.
The exhibition will be installed along the horizon line of a Field Farm meadows that is visible from Sloan Road. The sculptural artwork consists of twelve cast-concrete figures supported by steel-gauge wireframes that stand approximately nine feet tall. The figures are covered with a dry concrete spray, adorned with ceramic and found objects, and include steel-posts rooted into the ground with cement.
Simpson’s most ambitious work to date, Counterculture honors generations of marginalized people and cultures whose voices have been too often silenced by colonization. The figures look West across a post-apocalyptic vista, the vast homelands from which native peoples were forcibly removed. The artist imagines the figures as watchful presences, reminders that history and the natural world perpetually observe humanity. With hollow eyes that catch the morning sunlight, the feminine-bodied forms also suggest that Mother Earth shows us the way—that respect for the land and its original inhabitants are the honorable way forward.
