Art in public spaces

I am interested in developing works of art for public spaces, on a scale that interacts convincingly with public architecture, and which will be enjoyed by a large and diverse public.

In my work I like to transgress predictable perceptions of space and time: to widen horizons by installing indoor skies and vertical walls of grass, to have people walk through curtains of fire or car parts. By making work that can be touched and sometimes actually walked through, I challenge the conventional notion of art as something to be kept separate from the body. I think of my work as serious, certainly, but at the same time as both playful and poetic.

I am used to working within formal constraints. For example, in the commissions for the Kunsthaus Graz, Thierry Mugler, and American Express, I selected and interpreted visual elements that evoked each particular theme and then worked to reveal their abstraction, their rhythm, their edge.

Thanks to contemporary digital printing technology, my work can be mounted or printed directly on a variety of materials, including fabric, vinyl, glass, metal, PVC.

Wearable Art

Printing my work directly onto fabric offers great creative possibilities.

For the last three years I have been experimenting with printing on a number of different fabrics to create wearable objects, using designs derived from my original compositions.

Though I continue to experiment, my favorite product to date is the silk scarf: a wrap-around, 60 cm x 150 cm composition printed directly on silk crêpe (crêpe de soie). The inks penetrate this highly resistant, easily washable silk permanently, making the scarf durable in time. The printed silk softens with wear.

The scarves are signed and dated, and are printed in limited editions of 150 for each design.

Cinegrams of Nature, thoughts on the art of Simo Neri

A knowledge of the flux of nature - the subtle migrations of rocks, trees, leaves, grass, clouds, water, fire, cracks in the ground - comes to us through the reception of fragments. We feel, touch, smell, hear, and, most of all, see the surroundings bit by bit. In her successive unrolling of spools, Simo Neri has captured these multiple impressions of the natural world by combining the stillness of close-up photography with the sequencing of cinema, effectively presenting in cinegrams the mutability of nature. Her cinegrams unfurl as huge mosaics that can be scanned vertically or horizontally, but do not allow one’s vision to remain fixed on any single frame. We can walk through the strips, engulfed by fragments, made ever aware of the flutter, the trickle, the grinding, the flickering that accompanies our every movement.

Richard Ingersoll, June 2000

« ...Simo Neri’s mosaics are decidedly abstract, and force the imagination to reconstruct the idea of the whole from archetypes linked to personal experience. »

excerpt from « Some of the Parts » by Richard Ingersoll, April 2005

Some of the Parts (55.3 kb)