Greymatters : Simone Asia

Location: Morningside Gallery, Barbados Community College

Opening reception: October 12th, 2016

Exhibition dates: October 12th to October 28th, 2016

Punch Hotseat: October 19th, 2016

email: simone.asia@hotmail.com

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Simone Asia graduated from the Barbados Community College in 2011, with a BFA in Studio Art.
Since then, Simone's work has gained quite a following in the region, and she has continued to develop her practice while taking part in a number of local and regional residencies and group exhibitions.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I like to perceive my current series of work as an emotive response to personal experiences, ideas and analogies within my life.

I am inspired by personal journal entries, my thoughts and dreams along with ideas about science and the universe. I want to explore these ideas from my perspective and personal connection to them.

These ideas are expressed through very detailed, abstract drawings, rendered in pen and ink. With these, I want to create my alternate reality; my hybrids within my own universe.

The use of detail is a reflection of my obsessive nature; I think and write repetitively. I connect or merge images and patterns together because it is a depiction of everything happening in my mind. The way I put them together is a manifestation of the way thoughts are processed in my brain- very random, scattered, juxtaposed but all interlinked.

Although it can be time consuming, it is a stress reliever. It puts me in a trance-like state where it eludes the concept of time. It also distracts me from my racing thoughts. It is a discipline and a form of therapy 

SELECT WORKS FROM GREYMATTERS

Curatorial statement

"Like the entomologist in search of colorful butterflies, my attention has chased in the gardens of the grey matter cells with delicate and elegant shapes, the mysterious butter ies of the soul, whose beating of wings may one day reveal to us the secrets of the mind." - Santiago Ramon y Cajal

Sanitago Ramon y Cajal (1852-1934) was a Nobel-prize winning neuroscientist living and working in Spain during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The man who wrote so lyrically about exploring the garden of the brain in search of the butterflies of the soul was not just a poet; he was renowned for his “medical artistry” and hundreds of his drawings illustrating the “delicate arborizations” of brain cells are still in use today.

Cajal’s intricately detailed black and white illustrations are characterized by a patient and meticulous touch, a sensitive delicacy that is akin in many ways to Simone Asia’s own drawings. How curious is it then that she is also fascinated by the brain? In the diary in which Simone writes copious notes recording her own emotions and musings, the word brain recurs with regularity. Hence the title of this exhibition: “Greymatters.”

Grey matter refers to the area of the brain which contains most of the neuronal cell bodies and includes those regions involved in sensory perception such as seeing and hearing, as well as memory, emotions, speech, deci- sion making and self-control. It is responsible for the way in which we perceive the world around us and make sense of it. Simone’s deliberate modi cation of the term, combining the words and inventing its plural form, is a creative adjustment intended to connote that the musings contained here are significant – it matters; that there are a number of issues or matters to be considered; but that their meanings, far from being precise reside in a grey and reticulated area of interpretation.

“Greymatters,” Simone Asia’s first solo exhibition, is supported by a Butterworth / AFM International Bursary.