Further explore the exhibition’s theme of semi-visibility through a slow-looking exercise related to this work.

Transcript
Narrator: Lorna Simpson’s "Vertigo," from 2021, is a panoramic 12-foot-wide silkscreen print augmented with inks applied by brush and other means after printing. A contiguous zone of deep blue spans and dominates three-fourths of the work. Rectangular and printed on rigid fiberglass, it hangs like and resembles a gigantic painting, 8 1/2 feet tall.

It seems to depict a ranging seaside bluff or a cliff face. The top of the bluff appears only as a line that runs across the panorama beneath the sky. Smeary streaks stream down from it, like striations in rock. They overlap and interdiffuse: some hair-fine, some as broad as a quarter, some appearing crisp, others seeming just to cast a wash over others. Flashes of teal and shades of black inhabit it with vibrancy.

Along the bottom of the painting, the cliff face intersects a pale ragged-edged margin with a washed-over blue tinge. Variously smudged and blotchy, it seems to be a refuse piece of art paper that’s been pasted on. On closer inspection, it’s more akin to a photo of such a piece of paper.

Ink from a few streaks seems to have run off the cliff face onto the “paper” below. Two that cross completely appear to have been applied by brush purposely for that illusion. The rest, which are dried drip tracks, can be seen to originate from tiny puddlings of ink on the paper itself, close to but not quite at the edge with the blue.

Paralleling the striations left of center and partially obscured by a blue wash, there appears a vertical strip of four women’s headshots with hairstyles from the sixties. It seems to have been snipped from a brochure. The least streaked and clearest to see is the lowest, in which the woman rocks an afro. It’s possible all three above her are Black women, too, though their hair is straight, or straightened. The higher their heads and faces appear on the cliff face, the more feathered and in other ways whiter looking is their hair. It could be called a kind of vertigo: concern not to stick out as a woman of color as you ascend higher in a white world.

A few narrower strips of magazine text parallel the streaks elsewhere on the cliff face. Distinct strips of text, superficially alike in length, starting at the bottom undertaking to climb and join the world on top. Those on either side of the headshots protrude partially through the top edge into the sky. On top, their text has been inked over so that they resemble featureless smokestacks or maybe fixtures for hoisting things up the cliff.

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