SACRED SYMbols, 2025
Language coalesces and encodes human experience: it is the very means through which we engage, feel, and express perceived realities. Alphabets— language transmogrified into sets of sacred, yet distinct visual symbols— form the keys to the dissemination of knowledge, ideas, and narratives. Written text captures otherwise fleeting experiences of oral traditions to make them permanent. Similar to the act of writing, in artistic practice, resin applied to textile, an inherently pliable medium that can suspend, flow, and billow, translates shape-shifting moments and affixes them into states of permanence. Sacred Symbols takes inspiration from alphabetic letterforms, stretching them into the third dimension as a play on perspectival compositions that parallels the experience of shaping language.
Les Lumières (The Lights), 2024
Les Lumières explores the influence of language as it illuminates our existence and casts perceptions of reality. The draped forms represent different lights shining upon collective truths to inform and shape subjective experiences. Language is the apex of a triangulation that includes thought and culture: independent, yet intertwined aspects of human existence. Through it, we process sensory information – internally and externally – to form a cohesive understanding of the world as we know it.
SEEING IN TONGUES, Dowd Gallery, Santa Clara University, 2023
This project, Seeing in Tongues, was as an audiovisual installation (sculpture and sound). This creative work explored the idea of language and perception and how that defines an individual’s interpretation of reality. As someone who is bicultural and bilingual with dual citizenship in the States and France, the production of language has always been an integral part of how I interact with my reality. In pursuit of other non-native languages such as Italian and Arabic, I have chosen to spend time in Italy, North Africa, and the Middle East in addition to France and America. At foreign moments that intersect with my own interpretive language experiences, I have begun to perceive the various ways in which language shapes culture, reality and memory can be reflected in language, and how language produces ever changing realities.
SIMON LANZONI 