Category archives: Artist Pages

  • Raised in the deep South, Raina’s experience with the living past through storytelling and reenactment is extensive. Whether it is through painting, installation, video, performance, creative writing, sound, or community projects, her work investigates narrative through a poet’s lens. Raina Benoit received her BA from Louisiana State University in Liberal Arts and minored in Creative Writing (1999).  After living and working in New York City she continued her studies in France at the Atelier des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris (2001) where she studied in painting, drawing, and French. She completed her MFA (2006) at the University of Arizona where she was the founding member and co director of Plugged Art Collective, a grass roots digital arts organization responsible for creating and hosting a biannual international women’s video festival Her Shorts and Tucson’s first performance festival PerformIT.    Other projects include writing for the New Orleans art journal The Pelican Bomb “Survival Guide” series), working with the experimental performance troupe Bricolage Bizarre, and conjuring up ideas for future community collaborative projects such as the Florida based project entitled Tourist: a Visit Through Local Voices. Selected exhibitions and performances include Mass Moca (North Adams, MA), Fringe 1134 Gallery (New York, NY), Ad Hoc Gallery (Brooklyn, NY),  Platform Gallery (Tucson, AZ), Deland Museum of Art (Deland, FL), 911 Media Art Center (Seattle, Washington),  C. Eme[...]
  • I am interested in the tiny threads that make up a good story, when the division made between fact and fiction is no longer the issue.  This recent body of work is directly influenced by the place, the context, and the community in which it is displayed.  Ideas of the feminine, cohabitation, and the world as one giant organism are subtext to the work.  Living in various southern coastal towns, the tourism that keeps them alive, and the nature that is carved; bulldozed, and sculpted to make these towns possible was the impetus to the last seven years of research.  This body of work is an exploration of the nature that surrounds man’s developments and the battle between these two worlds. Largely influenced by animism, mysticism, anthropomorphism, news headlines, and trash, this body of work collages narratives found from within the environment and the remnants left behind by humans, at the border between the familiar and the estranged.  As an artist I am hunting to capture a truth whether it is metaphorical, momentary, or universal.
  • Please visit my full artist website: www.philipsimmons.net
  • Questions and comments welcome at simmonsphilip@gmail.com
  • Philip Simmons was born in Maryland, and studied English literature before attending the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, graduating with a degree in Fine Art in 1999. He then moved to Germany to work as an assistant to sculptor Hartmut Stielow and attend the University of Applied Arts and Sciences in Hannover. He earned his Master of Fine Arts degree over the course of two years. In addition, Simmons spent a year at the University of the Arts Berlin (HdK) in the atelier of Professor David Evison. Upon returning to the United States, Simmons moved to Brooklyn, where he lived and worked for 12 years. He has exhibited widely in group and solo shows in New York, Philadelphia, Denmark, Holland, and Germany, and been awarded residencies in Iceland and Holland.  He currently lives with his wife and daughter in Croton-on-Hudson, NY.
  • Sculpture: In my series of sculpture made of resin, metal, and vinyl, I draw on pop sources and the news media to comment on American culture. One of the themes that unifies this work is a nostalgia for a mythic golden age in American society that was created on television and in the movies. In this media landscape, cowboys and astronauts occupy the same cultural space. Some of these pieces start with an iconic image I find on the internet. The humor in some of the work comes from acknowledging the simplicity of that innocent viewpoint. Drawings: The drawings are inspired by contemporary and classical theories in math, science, and philosophy, including particle physics, cosmology, and string theory. Scientists and theorists have recently made significant strides towards understanding the fundamental structure of the universe, however, the fundamental truths remain elusive and difficult to prove. I see relationships between these ideas and the writings of David Hume, the 18th century skeptical philosopher who questioned our ability to know things with certainty, due to the fallibility of our human faculties.