Shadow Brokers

Bea Parsons, Lorraine Simms, Clement Valla

Curated by Kyle Hittmeier and Amanda Nedham

Press Release

Super Dutchess is delighted to present Shadow Brokers in collaboration with Galerie Deux Poissons of Montreal, Canada. The exhibition includes the work of three artists — Bea Parsons and Lorraine Simms of Montreal, and Clement Valla of New York City. This exhibition brings together a border crossing of artists and approaches, into a North American cross pollination of ideas about representations of the natural world.

How do you understand something that you have never seen? At the dawn of the 16th century, Albert Durer created his famous woodcut of a rhinoceros from a hand-written description and a sketch. In spite of his attempt to depict an animal that had not been seen on the continent since Roman times, it was riddled with errors that on the surface appeared empirical. We praise the gap between the imaginary and the documentary, the image of the rhino being an expression of the convergence of limited sources of information. 

Today we are operating in a different landscape, one of divergences, where definitions are exploded through science and technology and further refracted through the lens of the internet. The three artists in Shadow Brokers—the name being taken from the covert hacking group that famously upturned and repurposed the NSA’s cyberweapons—employ alternative means to bring us creatures that have the potential to alter how we remember nature. They subvert the tools that force the renegotiation of boundaries, ultimately carving new paths rife for unnatural selection.

Lorraine Simms virtuosic, meditative drawings represent layers of cast shadows of vulnerable and endangered species, of North American mammals. Generating imagery while working from 19th century non-data specimens at the American Museum of Natural History, she has cataloged a spectral bestiary of images, that are both powerfully totemic as well as scientifically accurate in their every dimension. 

 Bea Parsons’ dark but humorous monotype prints fuse elements of drawing, painting and printmaking processes, to produce unique edition works. Unfolding an idiosyncratic realm of symbolist imaginings, her landscapes and figures recombine and interweave, opening a portal onto scenes that are at once the sincere phantasms of an animistic vision as well as the conceptual proposition of a funny, and even campy, conceptual project. 

 Clement Valla’s work reifies and reimagines flora, fauna, and minerals observed in the natural world, transforming them by degrees of careful planning into beautiful objects of curious power. Whether he is using open source technology or writing his own code, Valla creates artificial reproductions or doppelgängers of natural phenomena - which somehow remain mimetically faithful - or at least reminiscent - to their original models, while drawing our attention to a deep string of themes and notions.