With a diverse body of work that combines photography, text, video, painting and sculpture, with a through line of conceptual art practice, Lorna Simpson defies easy categorization. Her decades-long exploration into how we interpret and understand the world around us has resulted in work that is at once intellectually rigorous and visually stunning. Nowhere is this more evident than in 2 Tracks, 1990, a photographic triptych depicting the back of a Black woman’s head, flanked by two individual locks of braided hair with text panels “Back” and “Track.”
Hair is a recurring visual theme in Simpson’s work, serving both as a surrogate for identity and as a symbol of the way in which femininity is constructed. In a lecture at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 2016, Simpson spoke of ‘this kind of format of work where I decided not to have the figure presented; its kind of sparing down the information in the frame in terms of who and what and what you can make of facial details. . . not giving the viewer all the information that they want in terms of these very precious kind of details that are usually present in photographic portraits and then delivering something else; bringing your attention to something else.’
As is often the case with Simpson’s work, the exact meaning of 2 Tracks is not prescribed, but she deftly brings our attention to themes of race, gender, memory, and progress or, as the words ‘Back’ and ‘Track’ suggest, a lack thereof.
