Outset Netherlands was delighted to have supported the exhibition Part and Whole by Theo Simpson at Foam Photography Museum as a result of awarding him with the Outset | Unseen Exhibition Fund 2017.
Founded in 2013, the Outset | Unseen Exhibition Fund was a unique partnership between Unseen Photo Fair, Foam and Outset Netherlands, providing a new institutional platform for emerging talent. Scouting the fair before opening hours, each year the curatorial committee selects one artist exhibiting at Unseen for a solo exhibition the following year at Foam Photography Museum, Amsterdam. This year the committee consisted of Caroline von Courten, Artistic Co-Director of Der Greif and managing editor of Foam International Photography Magazine 2010-2012, Federica Chiocchetti, curator, writer, editor and lecturer specialised in photography and Francesco Zanot, Curator at CAMERA, Turin.
Theo Simpson’s work stands out for its unique visual language, which combines photography with alternate forms of material expression such as sculpture and site-specific work. Simpson uses his own local landscape of Northern England as the starting point for an exploration of the dynamic interactions between ideologies, economies, industries and environments.
Materials, processes and technologies from the past and present are treated by Simpson as a way of opening up different fields of discovery, where new principles and methods of expression can be achieved. He often combines this with archival material he avidly collects, all of which is from different points of time and origins, such as instructional photography found in workshop manuals and reference books, advertisements, colour charts, data sheets and found imagery.
In his work, the artist creates a dialogue between the past and the present, reconsidering and reforming personal and cultural myths, dreams, losses and promises referring to the industrial past of his surroundings, opening up a space where a new dialogue can begin. His exhibition Part and Whole featured a selection of his most recent works, a number of which premiered at Foam.
ON VIEW: 19th January – 1st April 2018
