Fin Simonetti b. 1985

Fin Simonetti (b. 1985, Vancouver) is a Canadian artist and musician based in New York. Simonetti received her BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 2009. Her work examines the entangled relationship between measures of control and desires for security. Simonetti uses imagery that is designed to tap into our visceral fears, and conceptually moves between rendering sculptural forms that represent both protection and vulnerability. The artist’s frequent use of stained glass references its history as a common trade amongst Italian immigrants in Canada, including the artist’s own family.

Recent solo exhibitions include Hardening, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2023); Our Denomination, Cooper Cole, Toronto, Canada (2022); My Volition, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2021); Fin Simonetti: An Appeal to Heaven, alongside Louise Bourgeois and Chris Curreri, Esker Foundation, Calgary, Canada (2021); Head Gusset, Cooper Cole, Toronto (2019); Pledge, Company Gallery, New York (2019); Pastoral Emergency, SIGNAL, New York (2018); LIFEMORTS, Interstate Projects, New York (2017); and IS PATH WARM?, Good Weather, Little Rock, AK (2017). Group exhibitions include Prosthesis, Haynes Art Projects, Chicago (2023); Drawings by Sculptors, Helena Anrather, New York (2023); Second Best Scenario, Francesca Minini, Milan (2022); Summer Nights, curated by Kahil Irving, Canada, New York (2022); Summer Days, curated by Kahil Irving, Klaus von Nichtssagend, New York (2022); Concrete Spiritual, Morán Morán, Los Angeles (2022); Recent Sculpture, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2022); Realism of the Game, Tranzit, Bucharest, Romania (2021); Material Conditions, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2020); To dream a man, Clima, Milan (2020); Harvest, curated by Bob Linder, Slash Art, San Francisco (2020); Dog Days, Clearing, New York (2019); New Moon, Hotel Art Pavilion, New York (2019); Cerrajeria, Lock Up International, Mexico City (2018); Eye to Eye, Arsenal Contemporary, New York (2018); Altered, Company Gallery, New York (2018); At the End of the Game, Alyssa Davis Gallery, New York (2018); Pleasure Over Matter, The Space Company, San Francisco (2018); Fear Faire, Marinaro, New York (2018); The Belly & the Members, MX Gallery, New York (2018); Paperweights, Fisher Parrish, New York (2017); and Industry Woman, MoMA PS1, New York (2016), among others.

An Appeal to Heaven, Esker Foundation, Calgary, Canada, January 23 - June 27, 2021

Fin Simonetti works with sculpture, installation, and drawing to investigate the uneasy terrain among our desire for security, states of fragility and vulnerability, and the sensorial, emotional, and psychological relationships we have to objects, bodies, and spaces. Her work adopts forms and imagery with corporal, visceral resonance that poetically undermine our senses of familiarity and ease. An Appeal to Heaven presents recent works in carved stone and stained glass that, through paradoxical relationships between form and material, connect to themes of emergency, protection, and control. Simonetti’s use of stained glass and stone are resonant with historical and familial connections. She learned to work in stained glass – a trade practiced by generations of Italian immigrant families, including her own – from her paternal uncle who designed and fabricated windows for cathedrals and private homes. Stained glass often evokes thoughts of religious architecture, beauty, and sanctuary, but here, configured into the jagged open jaws of two bear traps, the material suggests something quite different—something threatening, dangerous, yet ultimately disastrously futile in its function.

Running the length of the West gallery, a long black metal railing divides the space; however, unlike the purpose of a typical railing, it is not present here to provide stability or protection. Rather, it acts by enforcing a logic and regulation of movement through the exhibition. Perched atop its narrow surface, a series of objects precariously balance. Carved from Spanish blue alabaster, each piece is a replica of something we might reach for in case of emergency, or for our personal protection. Rendered in cold blue stone, however, these objects are frozen, impotent, and useless. Following the death of her father, Simonetti began stone carving in 2017 as a way to process their complicated relationship and her grief. Double Bind, from that year, is the head of a muzzled pit bull rendered in flesh-like Portuguese pink marble. The pit bull is a recurring figure in Simonetti’s work, emblematic of a weaponized body that is popularly objectified as a representation of power, threat, and masculine violence. However, pit bulls also represent protection and security, and they enjoy a close relationship with humans as “man’s best friend.” Within each of these areas, the concept of the body runs as a through line. As Simonetti articulates, she is interested in “the unstable line between the body that is a threat and the body that is threatened.” In these works, our bodies and the bodies of others become sites for excavation, emotional and physical; they are replete with fissures and sutures and are also

subject to the authority of objects and architectural design—devices of control that make the viewer

acutely aware of their own body in space.

Means of Egress, VII International Moscow Biennale of Young Art, Khamovniki District, Moscow, 2020

The Moscow International Biennale for Young Art is pleased to present its seventh iteration, I don’t know whether the Earth was spinning or not…, co-curated by Francesca Altamura (Brooklyn, NY, USA) and Lizaveta Matveeva (St. Petersburg, Russia). In a radical response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biennale’s Main Project launched a bespoke digital platform designed by Jen Lu, experiential artist, Doa Jafri and Chewy Wu, creative technologists, Anton Moek, 3D artist, and Toga Cox, sound engineer. The project included twenty-one international artists and artist groups from Bahrain, Canada, Iran, Poland, the Philippines, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and featured a variety of existing and newly commissioned digital works ranging from fictional short films, to stop motion animations, PDFs, audioscapes, creative coding, screensavers, and digital zines. Alongside St. Petersburg-based architecture firm Chvoya, the curators designed an installation highlighting the digital platform at the Museum of Moscow, also on view from November 3–December 6, 2020. In revising the Biennale format, the project’s digital platform provided access to thousands more online visitors than the in-gallery presentation alone.

The exhibition’s title is borrowed from Russian Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov’s 1909 poem of the same name which illustrates his doubts about normative social conventions and generally accepted laws of the universe. Khlebnikov expresses his desires to erase spatial and temporal boundaries and to create a formula for heightened creativity and eternal life. The poem’s invocation of existential ambivalence, compounded with aspirations of prioritizing and liberating the creative spirit, are sentiments which can be easily translated to the contemporary zeitgeist. The participating artists confront the loneliness and vulnerability at the heart of our era by interweaving black humor, satire, irony, the uncanny, and the grotesque into multi media works that reveal their fears, anxieties, and everyday truths with an absurdist spin. Amid a global culture of intolerance, mistrust, nationalism, aggression, radical inequality, as well as the existential threats of climate change, nuclear annihilation, and pestilence, the absurd has become an international lexicon, an aesthetic of mental escape, and a mode of survival in the decades following the fall of Soviet Communism and the rise of corrupt free-market capitalist regimes. “I don’t know whether the Earth is spinning or not…” brings together emerging artists and poets who construct subtle ways of operating, resisting, and thriving within the shadows, and whose works are framed by the acknowledgement of absurdity’s role in subverting the darkness all around us.