Group shows | Articulate

Opens on Jul 29 until Aug 13, 2023

Actions and reactions to and within environments of popular culture, The Contemporary, politics, consumerism, and mass production can define how we perceive ourselves and the character we project. When navigating this world do we drift, or do we define, do we succumb to, or do we control our identity within a narrative of others and systems more powerful than us? The Rainmaker challenges and detaches structures of power and control to define and express a true, raw, and unique individuality by questioning and abstracting the possibility that we can be completely free of everything, to literally be nothing other than an entirely pure and unadulterated expression of self.

My creative expression investigates my relationship between the world outside and my world within. From a young age drawing was the beginning of my artistic practice where I learnt and honed a particular set of techniques that I have expanded in painting, photography, video, and screen printing, where screen printing is a space that allows me to pull these mediums together. My perspective of the external reflects a fascination with sight, light, the beautiful, the ugly, the sublime and the ordinary. My world within is a personal space where I can express raw emotion as an abstraction that responds to, and liberates me from ideologies, politics, consumerism, and society generally.
Drawing, abstract art, and explorations of the urban environment, give my mind time out from the more intensive work I make around social and pop cultural reflections, political critiques, to social detours and culture jams. From time to time, I will execute works that deliver satire and expression to hijack and subvert the viewers perception of mainstream paradigms to counter destructive cultural and countercultural vehicles. It is not lost on me that my work is not detached from my own perspectives and knowledge, it is in part a reflection of who I am, where I am and what I exist within, to this end my artistic practice will be ever changing. As I change my art will change, as society changes my art will change, it is a contemporary flux, where transformation is never ending.

Working from the Wangal land in Eora, Western Sydney, Andrew Simms is a current Visual Arts honours undergraduate at Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney

Andrew Simms

The Rainmaker, 2022