Drive

With a special thanks to the City of Melbourne Small Business Transformation Grants

Watch Michael Simms discussing his practice and latest series of artworks. (Created by Cinematographer/Director Matthew Wells www.mwfw.net) Michael Simms' new exhibition teases out the central question of what drives human behaviour. Using the figure to explore his interest in concepts of the unconscious and identity formation, alongside the artist's own  queerness, Simms' works delve into taboos of human contact, disconnection and dream states. Frustrations with the limitations of corporal bodies, issues of narcissism and the creation of online personas in the increasingly hyper digital environment are also explored.

Freudian theories such as that of Eros and Thanatos - representing the innate drive for creativity, life and productivity existing in opposition to the innate impulse towards death and destruction - are embodied, alongside a deliberate use of repetition to articulate ideas of unconscious drive enacted within our contemporary lives, as well as within humanities compulsion to repeat similar patterns of behaviour.

Michael Simms catalogue essayBy Steve Dow, 2020

Our personas can shift shape with technology and the needs of the moment. Returning to a North Sydney studio shared with other artists after weeks of pandemic-induced social isolation, Michael Simms is reinterpreting a Greek god legend through a dream-like modern filter of identities crafted online.

A jolting jack hammer and a child crying in the distance herald the sounds of a city returning to some form of normal after Covid-19’s first antipodean sweep. The model on some of the canvases here for Simms’s solo exhibition Drive is the artist, because life models were unavailable early in this physically distanced epoch. 

But the works are not about the artist per se: they are about the universal longing for human contact and the drive governing our cycles and repetitions of behaviours. 

This is art that plays with both positive creativity and our capacity for self-destruction. This tension is only heightened at a time the temptation to touch fellow human flesh is taboo, when the urge to hug, kiss and even shake hands is denied for its potentially fatal consequences.

Light and dark underscore this thematic duality; as a painter, Simms, 32, sees himself as a tonalist, with colour as a secondary concept. In one painting, multitudes of nude human figures collide with one another as they tumble down. 

“There’s a disconnect a lot of people have been feeling, just slightly missing each other,” Simms muses. “I still feel human interaction’s a bit weird at the moment. A misfire.”

He points to a painting which references Jupiter and Io, the 16th century Italian high renaissance painting by Antonio da Correggio, in which Jupiter, the god of the sky, shapeshifts to seduce his mortal lover Io. “Jupiter has got the guise of a cloud, to have some anonymity from his other lovers while seducing her,” says Simms.

“I found it really interesting to replace the idea of the cloud with a phone, and that online seduction being ethereal. You don’t really know who you’re talking to. I’ve had these strange experiences where you’re not sure if what’s going on is real.”

These new works grew out of Simms’s recent contributions to group exhibitions at Flinders Lane Gallery. Undercurrents, in 2018, explored the unconscious, and Simms’s paintings for that show also occupied the gap between online personas and real life situations, “the veil of anonymity that was a gateway for people to explore their unconscious desires”. 

The painting subjects were almost integrated with their smart phones – but alone, atomised, alienated, perhaps disassociated from their actions. In creating those works, Simms was working both instinctually and from experience of using online meeting apps to chat to other men. “I’d been through a relationship breakdown, and that was my access to the community at the time.”

The 2019 group exhibition Nude bore the fruit of Simms’s contemporaneous residency at the New York Academy of Art, an “amazing” experience for the artist that strengthened his interest in human form and anatomy.

Born in Adelaide in 1987, Simms’s introverted personality meant he spent a lot of time drawing while growing up in Flagstaff Hill. He had a speech impediment as a child, which would pique his growing interest in human behavior and the brain. 

A pivotal moment occurred when his year 10 art teacher – who also had a speech impediment and was the subject of jokes by Simms’s peers – assigned the class to create self-portraits. The teacher advised Simms to paint an idealised version of himself without acne, the common teenage rite of passage that was making Simms particularly self-conscious and reluctant to carry through the assignment.

Simms would later study psychology, gaining a bachelor of arts and a bachelor of behavioural science at Flinders University, before studying for his diploma of fine arts on scholarship at Sydney’s Julian Ashton Art School.

Today, he often paints portraits, such as singer Paul Capsis, actor Genevieve Lemon and author Thomas Keneally. So what does he do when a subject tells him they are self-conscious about a facial feature?

“I think that’s a real challenge because people see each other and themselves so subjectively,” he says. “How I see someone is probably very different from their self-image. But that’s why I like painting actors, particularly from the stage, because they’re very aware of their own image, so they’re perhaps not so precious about it.”

Actors’ tools of crafting an image sit neatly with Simms’s artistic interests in identity. “I want to know about their profession, how they get into a character and how it feels to be someone else on stage.” 

Music is an important inspiration for Simms. He plays piano, often the Romantic composers Chopin and Beethoven, and lately the “repetition and empathy” of Bach and the “ordered and mechanical but moving and emotional” works of Philip Glass. 

He also listens to “camp” pop music when painting. “If it was just silence I don’t think I’d be productive at all. I’d just be locked in my own thoughts, overthinking everything.”

Films such as Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) are influences on Simms’s art, while the tone, colour and form of Swedish-born Norwegian figurative painter Odd Nerdrum and the surreal figures in US realist painter Vincent Desiderio are also sources of inspiration.

Dreams are obviously having an impact on Simms’s shapes and subjects. “When we went into lockdown, I think a lot of people had the same experience where they had really weird dreams,” he says.

“When I start writing them down it opens up this whole other world. One piece I’m planning for the exhibition is a figure that’s sleeping. It’s still an interesting gateway into the unconscious.”

Simms is working on a series of small, rougher, more experimental studies for the exhibition, part of a plan to curb his habit of overworking his art.

“Sometimes people have said to me, ‘It actually looks better a few steps before that, when it was still quite rough’,” he says. “Knowing where to finish something is one of hardest parts of the process for me.”

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Simms has been a finalist in the Shirley Hannan Portrait Prize (2020), the Percival Portrait Prize (2020), the Kennedy Art Award (2019), the Eutick Memorial Still Life Award (2019), the Lethbridge Art Award (2019), the Percival Tucker Portrait Prize (2018) and winner of both the Young Artist Prize through the Art Society of NSW (2018), and of the SBS Portrait Prize (2018). In 2017 he was a finalist in the prestigious Doug Moran Portrait Prize, the Mosman Art Prize and the Fisher’s Ghost Art Prize among others. Simms first exhibited with FLG as part of our Exploration exhibition series in 2017. His work is in numerous private collections including the Elliott Eyes Collection, the Thomas Keneally Centre at the Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts, Cliftons Venues, Sydney, YSC Consulting Sydney.