In 2021, I was invited to serve on a panel of advisors for a Royal Ontario Museum (a.k.a. ROM) exhibition featuring the works of Elias Sime. Sime lives in Ethiopia. His artwork transforms the detritus and waste of electronic products and our tech lives into big, gorgeous and surprising canvases. From a distance, the artworks are riveting; then, as you step closer, they grow more and more mesmerizing as you begin to see the countless myriad pieces that make up the larger canvasses, including components and innards of computers and cell phones, wires, keyboards, circuit boards, diodes and more that create a new kind of pointillism custom made for our digital era.
The complexity and ambition of each work clarifies itself as you step forward and backward. His work delights and provokes thought, especially on capitalism and where all of the discard and refuse of our frenzied global consumerism goes after it’s used.
I appreciated the opportunity to contribute, even in a small way, to this captivating exhibit, titled Elias Sime: Tightrope. One of the highlights was learning about Sime’s work, which goes far beyond the pieces shown at the ROM into projects involving artistic collaboration, architecture and landscape design and the promotion of African art on the global stage.
In calling together a group of exhibition advisors, the ROM was looking for ways to strengthen its outreach to communities that have been traditionally underserved in past exhibition marketing and promotion. I applaud that effort and hope to see more of that kind of initiative taken by other museums and galleries as well. Over the course of a few months, the panel of advisors met to share and develop recommendations on how to reach and attract a diverse audience to experience the work of this most innovative and versatile of global artists. COVID restrictions added to the challenge. It was an honour and a pleasure to serve as an advisor and to collaborate with a number of incredibly creative and talented people who also served as advisors, and with the ROM staff who guided our efforts. I want to thank especially Swarupa Anila, Senior Vice President for Exhibition and Gallery Development at the ROM, for inviting me to participate, and Silvia Forni, the exhibition curator, for guiding our learning about and immersion in Sime’s work. Consulting with Sime directly on his vision and work was a highlight of the experience.
Following the advisory panel’s consultations, and before the opening, I was invited to contribute and record an audio-tour reflection on one of the featured works, a piece titled Tightrope: Internalized that I found especially captivating. The launch of the exhibition was delayed a few times in response to COVID surges, but finally opened in late summer 2021 on a compressed timeframe. If you missed the exhibition, you can experience Tightrope: Internalized and other amazing works by Sime on the ROM’s Elias Sime: Tightrope audio-tour webpage.