Exhibition: April 11-21, 2022
Reception & Gallery Talk: Thursday, April 14 5:30-7:00pm
What if the level of violence and absurdity with which women are subject to online is met with a fever-pitch of feminized absurdity? Lisa Simms’ thesis work is a visually extravagant, comedic, and critical response to the manosphere—a term used to describe the vast and growing realms of the internet that are havens for misogyny.
The lines between vulgarity and innocence are blurred through the conflation of grotesquely gendered childhood icons (such as glitter stickers, candies, Barbie shoes, & plastic toys) and their adult counterparts (sex toys, genital candies, etc.).The horrifying content of the manosphere is transformed into stickers and icing and shrouded in faux-fur. Here the manosphere message is heckled and drowned out by a fiercely feminist comeback.
Welcome to REPLY.
Lisa Simms graduated with her BFA in painting from Truman State University and will graduate in May 2022, with her MFA from the University of Missouri. Simms is a local of Columbia and has been involved in the Columbia youth art community as a student, artist and teacher through the C.A.R.E. Art Gallery, Resident Arts, and Columbia Art League for many years. She has also been performing stand up comedy across the country since her adolescence, and this influences much of the work she creates.
Simms has had her work published in Property Materials, F*EMS, and Polemical zine. She has had two solo exhibitions in Columbia’s Dogwood Artist Space and Uprise Bakery. She has shown work in the AND/OR Graduate Showcase in Bingham Gallery, Personifying Pleasure in the Stay Home Gallery, and Is This Supposed to Be Funny? International Exhibition in Bunker Center for the Arts.