Garry Simmons show at Metro Pictures is an extensive catalog of paintings, drawings, and sculptures made over the last 20 years. The work surveys Simmons long quest into the status of race today in contemporary culture through a wide range of mediums and methods. Simmons work, which is at once cheeky, dark, and twisted, seems to be concentrated on the fact that racial concerns can be recirculated and reinvented to generate an alternative lens on their history. His erased blackboard drawings and smeared text paintings suggest an attempt at erasing a loaded history and that through time the significance of racial issues begin to blur and loose resolution.
