An Interior Biography - by DM Simons

Images and words are the stuff of history spilling into clichés. It is the cliché not the image, not the picture that reverberates, that echoes the traffic of history, the freighted footprint of our existence. The mining of the cliché, excavating it as representation, as picture—co-opting it, infusing it with an urgent agency.

Revitalizing it's tenants—history, popularity, repetition, myth—rents the cliché as we understand it, and it's purpose outside and separate from comfort of it's couching not as familiar or non threatening but edgy unsure, captivating. With use the cliché becomes it's cliché.

Using images, be it photographs or film stills (Still-life) tells a better story or at least an interesting one. The manipulation of fragments, of feelings, of thoughts rent mute is the gist of our interior selves as story. Pictures, singularly or in juxtaposition with others act like a mise en scene. It is not what is seen but what is suggested that is the condition, the echo of it's own cliché. A clarity of intent obscured, filtered, suggests an enigmatic reading. Images occupy the fragile working place of memory/imagination. Agitating this cleavage between thought and action develops the inchoate into something like an identity, like an understanding though fleeting. My work is a representation of a representation, an acknowledgement of the cliché and sharing with the past, with the present and future.