Michael Simms & Kirk Page
Staged Theoretical
Essay by Lucie Reeves-Smith
The wild natural beauty of Bundanon, on the New South Wales South Coast, has been a fertile and productive site for artistic residency exchanges since its conception as a gift from Arthur and Yvonne Boyd to the Australian people and local community in 1993. Over two weeks in 2024, Adelaide-born contemporary painter Michael Simms engaged with the site’s ideals of multi-disciplinary knowledge sharing with an unprecedented collaboration with Munanjali actor, dancer and creative director, Kirk Page, combining movement, photography and painting to examine the institutionalised concept of marriage through a queer lens and First Nations experience. Representing a daring departure from Simms’ previous paint-based figurative practice, the photographic series that emerged from the pair’s collaboration was experimental and process-based, providing a critique of Australia’s still-present divides along lines of race and sexual identity, resonant with iconographic echoes of Arthur Boyd’s own celebrated Bridesseries, created 75 years ago.
Overlapping their respective practices of portraiture and movement-based artistic expression, Page and Simms play themselves the roles of the two protagonists in this queer love story between two people and the landscape. Playing with the introduction of framing devices made of local timber, and atmospheric photographic manipulations, the series is imbued with a dream-like tension. Inadvertently, it recalled the theatrical surrealism of Arthur Boyd’s seminal modernist suite, the conscious-stricken paintings known as Love, Marriage and Death of a Half-Caste (1957 - 1960). While the site of Bundanon at Shoalhaven was inextricably linked with Boyd’s later sublime depictions of the landscape, the luminous ‘Brides’ series remain his most powerful works, expressing the artist’s humanism and deep compassion for Australia’s First Nations community. Respected Indigenous academic Dr Marcia Langton AO has read the series as an attempt by the artist to atone for his inheritance of wealth, land and privilege, the historical proceeds of violent colonisation.1 A heightened allegorical drama, it presents a doomed love story between an aboriginal man and his young wife of a mixed racial background, their futile desperation dramatised through the formalised social rituals of Western society - the wedding and the funeral. Simms and Kirk’s photographs, created in the present-day fractured political context, reckoning with similar notions of privilege, particularly interrogating the gains and losses of a successful same-sex marriage plebiscite and a shamefully demoralising outcome to the Voice to Parliament referendum. The traces of the artist’s bodies in the landscape enact a poignant and cathartic narrative, illustrating like Boyd had, a search for love and legitimacy.
Fragments of a larger movement-based performance produced within the landscape, this suite of photographs distils with dramatic lyricism the exchanges of power and vulnerability between two men. Within the ancient landscape of Yuin Country, by the riverbank and amongst the trees, Simms and Page employ the multivalent symbol of the veil. Here, it takes the form of a plastic sheet, its adornment evoking the various trauma-informed barriers to intimacy particular to the queer community. It obscures the artists’ reflection in the river, and trails behind them as they run away, encloses the lovers and then hangs like a wraith in the air after they have left the scene, suspended on the wooden frame. It inhibits between them the creation of true, reciprocal interaction and a respectful presence within the pristine landscape cleft by the meandering Shoalhaven river, under bright skies and in the inky darkness of night.
Presented alongside the suite of photographs is a group of recent figurative paintings by Simms, continuing his investigation into an homoerotic reframing of the classical male nude. Contorted and pushed to the edges of the picture plane, Simms’ figures are unbound and in a continual process of movement, as a gentle awakening of the static, statuesque male form. This push from classical contexts and the consumption of the idealised male form has been inspired by Simms engagement with experimental movement workshops, in which he contorts his body into unexpected forms in an abstract search of re-shaping. Painted with a restricted tonal palette, the focus of Simms’ aesthetic enquiry is in the creation of tension and vulnerability through tightly cropped compositions and dramatic chiaroscuro lighting.
– Lucie Reeves-Smith
1. Langton, M., ‘Arthur Boyd: Possession, Land, Spirit’, in Arthur Boyd: Brides, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Victoria, 2014, p.32
Michael Simms & Kirk Page
Staged Theoretical
Essay by Vicki Van Hout
Michael Simms and Kirk Page, two bodies united through voice across cultures and mediums, navigating a relational trajectory in the topography of Country. Like a queen in tartan regalia propped against and distanced from a painted backdrop depicting her untamed dominion, the serenity of this wild is inversely separated by two ‘knaves’ sheathed in a blanket of clear polymer.
Yet this is where the colonial portrait and this photographic essay depart. Whereas the images that inspired the genesis of this collection were heightened by a residency at the Arthur Boyd estate at Bundanon, by the man whose life's work speaks to humanitarian issues and universal themes of love, loss and shame, in rambunctious strokes of pigment upon canvas – the following images rendered in digital pixels capture, by the very nature of photography, an exposition of real-time intimacy, a specificity of vulnerability in closer proximity. Through political and personal reflection, a latent dialogue with Arthur Boyd’s Central Desert Bridal series of the 1950’s and 60’s emerged– not as a starting point but as a post-realised discovery. Where Boyd highlighted the unfortunate plight of the half-caste newlywed, Page and Simms aim to similarly call attention to the pitfalls of queer relationships against a backdrop of lingering heteronormative convention.
This collection chronicles an emotive journey set very much in our contemporary context. The isolation of bushland is garishly juxtaposed by the tarpaulin which distorts the action on the other side of it, becoming somewhat of an allegory for a lens. Perception is warped, conjectures unfounded, truth held only by the players set on the stage – a boisterous coupling barely contained behind the fog generated by the initial burst of lust or a brewing quarrel? The heightened surreal hues burnt into the landscape by the Australian sun mirror-imaged in the water’s reflection, the refracted light a harbinger of promises and false positives. The plastic, a portent of inaccessibility, of inevitable solitude and trauma – exaggerates and magnifies little disturbances, until no plastic is needed to create the void of broken attachment.
However, all is not lost. When this union of the painter in Michael Simms, who requires a clean image where the action is ambiguous yet uncluttered, unfettered by sidelines and unnecessary subtext, met in practice with the showmanship of Kirk Page who conversely invites the detritus into the frame, to muddy and misdirect conventionality, something more important transpired… in four years of collaboration, they forged a new songline. A romance in art making alone, Staged Theoretical is their first official ‘outing’ as contemporary arts collaborators. An exhibition realised through the development of a rigorous arts practice which involved a daily schedule beginning with a morning warm up, consisting of an exchange of tasks focusing on physical mobility. This was followed by improvisations with Michael filling the aural vacuum by playing piano, as Kirk vocalised, while similarly fleshing out the space with embodied riffs and jams in accompaniment.
A second residency, the Gang Gang residencies program in Bermagui built upon their routine, to include perambulated wanderings to collect organic materials to fashion a frame of which they placed themselves within. This exhibition also shows drawings which compliment the sculptural nature of their collaborative output. Created through kinaesthetic engagement with the canvas exceeding mere inscription predicated upon the pincer grip handiwork with charcoal. In comparison to the photographic images which are representative of the journey to the place in which they have arrived, the drawings are embodied expressions of the willingness to harness their creative connection to continue working together in an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural capacity.
– Vicki Van Hout