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Kate Simmons

When the World Looks Away

“There is no witness so terrible and no accuser so powerful as conscience which dwells within us.” – Sophocles

Three years ago, I visited the Alexander Art Gallery for the first time. I had come to review Henk Pander’s The Ordeal, not knowing it would be his last solo exhibition before he died the next year. Paintings and drawings from across a lifetime depicted apocalyptic scenarios and narratives that referenced predominantly death and destruction. As I wrote at the time, “No matter how expertly painted, how creatively crafted, how defiantly clinging to beauty in all its visual instantiations, these paintings are about horror, that which is unleashed upon the world by evil forces, that which is experienced by the subjects of the painting, and that induced in us who view the cruelty on hand.”

The painter would have probably agreed that some of these sentiments apply to the work currently at the gallery. Sam Marroquin‘s exhibition When the World Looks Away is about the years of ongoing horror experienced by Palestinians in Gaza. The artist confronts us with depictions of humans under existential threat, their bodies and spirits under relentless assault, their culture and history intentionally eradicated, their grief more than a single generation can hold. As of this writing, there are now Israeli orders for even Doctors without Borders and other aid organizations to leave the strip by February, during ongoing mass displacement. This, and continued violence despite the cease fire agreements, will worsen the situation for the civilian population.

Alexander Art Gallery featuring Sam Marroquin

Henk would have been thrilled to see that there is a young artist at the beginning of her promising career taking up the mantle of bearing witness, and calling on us to do the same. This is pretty much where the comparison ends, though, given that he created huge oil paintings, and large pen-and-ink drawings thriving on the contrast between their size and the pristine executions of small strokes, thin lines and subtle markings. Marroquin’s, in contrast, are mixed media works, blind contour outlines drawn in charcoal, filled with acrylic paint, with added text for many of them.

I had seen a smaller subset of these intense paintings before, impressed by the use of her non-dominant hand to produce fluid impressions of scenes depicted on videos and print material of first hand experiences by Palestinians and other witnesses on site. At the time, the focus in conversations with the artist was on the selectivity of our media diets, connected to where we feel ideologically, or intellectually or “tribally” at home. Live witness accounts of the trauma are available, but never disseminated by most of the mass media, or are actively suppressed by factions on either side of the conflict. Marroquin felt compelled to step into the breach and expose us to the accounting, provide access to information that is not predetermined by the setting on our news channels and social media.

Sam Marroquin Despair (2024)

Seeing the body of work a second time, now in its entirety of over a hundred paintings, smartly curated by Kate Simmons, reinforced some of my earlier reactions and provoked additional observations. Unsurprisingly, my current (independent) reading also shifted the focus, and so will make an appearance here in a bit.

Sam Marroquin Starving (2024)

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On a number of dimensions, Marroquin’s work reminds me of that of Charlotte Salomon, who was murdered in Auschwitz. The German artist’s paintings were fluid, influenced by graphic design, amounting to the impression of a graphic novel. They were narrating the autobiographical experiences, early life and later suffering of a Jewish woman who had to flee state violence and racist persecution, to no avail. Caught in France, she was shipped to the camps, her paintings survived in hiding. It was a large body of cumulative work, depicting multiple facets of life under existential threat on pieces of cheap paper, with whatever coloring materials could be secured in exile. She added text to amplify the universal meaning of individual experiences.

Charlotte Salomon  Life? Or Theater?  Excerpts (1941-1943)

When the World Looks Away shows a lot of stylistic visual resemblance, eschewing conventional painting for a more graphic style. Manga books come to my mind. The compulsive inclusion of every aspect of the narrative is also present. Marroquin refers to the loss of life and limb, the hunger, the bombings, the absence of medical care or the difficulty to obtain it. She depicts the attacks on select groups beyond Hamas terrorists, journalists, medical personnel and aid workers included, on top of the indiscriminate targeting of civilians. The painter describes the intentional destruction of cultural and educational institutions, the fate of political prisoners. She also refers to the international protests, and the treatment of protestors as criminals. The artist uses script often by doubling and superimposing words, creating an echo effect that resonates across time. Just like in Salomon’s work, witnessing is one of the through lines of Marroquin’s approach.

Sam Marroquin Goodbyes (2024)

Over and over the current paintings return to the children: innocents swallowed up into a maelstrom of violence and grief, at times specifically targeted, least able to defend themselves against the dangerous pressures of hunger, disease and cold. Irrespective of type of conflict, partisanship, country, from the Middle East to Syria, Ukraine, Sudan or the Republic of Congo, young non-actors who are most in need of protection are sacrificed to the ravages of war. Orphaned, disoriented, starving, burnt and maimed, they induce such a fright into the empathetic viewer that you want to turn away.

Sam Marroquin A Fine Line Between Life and Death (2024)

Sam Marroquin Where to? (2024)

Sam Marroquin Starved to Death (2025)

The artist bears witness – and tries to compel us to same – to the agony war unleashes onto humanity, regardless of who are the perpetrators, who are the victims, what cause can claim to be justified or what lessons of history are ignored. (Regarding the Gaza conflict, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague is considering a case since late December 2023, claiming Israel was violating the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide through its actions in Gaza. It will likely take until 2028 to get a decision. Full arguments for the case from Israel are due next week, January 12th, 2026. If ICJ judges will find that both acts of genocide and incitement to genocide have taken place, their orders should bind states. However, there is really no mechanism to enforce international law, in particular international human rights law and international humanitarian law.)

Marroquin’s unflinching gaze on suffering, pain likely vicariously experienced when putting it into visual form across years of exposure, is remarkable. I would not have that in me. I can barely look at it for long amounts of time, which makes me ashamed.

Sam Marroquin To Grieve (2024)

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It’s one thing to feel shame about not meeting your own standards. It is an uncomfortable feeling, and saddening. Emotions run even higher when I am told by others, “You should be ashamed of yourself!” But I am also mindful of the converse — when, for example, I find myself angry that others are not ashamed by their (often tacit) acceptance of actions or events I regard as vile. I certainly find myself enraged when the powerful act hideously and with no sense of shame.

Shame, and its counterpart shamelessness, deserve a closer examination, given that they are ubiquitous, and clearly provoking massive reactions. They are of importance in my own ways of approaching the world, obviously including the reception of art. They are also important in configuring the world I live in, often not for the better (just think of all the shaming around body image, or sexual victimizing on the internet, as just one example.) Two recently published and/or translated books are currently on my desk to help understand what’s at stake.

David Keen’s Shame: The Politics and Power of an Emotion just arrived, so I can only report on the introduction, but am already intrigued. Keen is a British political economist and Professor of Complex Emergencies at the London School of Economics. The core of the book tackles how shame can be instrumentalized, in politics, in war, in social hierarchies that assign (and reserve) a space to victims or for perpetrators. Shame can be loaded onto people, often with nefarious purposes, and in turn falsely promised to be lifted (often by the same actors who impose it in the first place.) In a social-media linked society where shame and shaming is increasingly prevalent, “shamelessness itself can be sold as an attractive spectacle – a symbolic escape from shame, a taste of freedom, a flight from the constraints, disparagements, insults self-doubt and self-admonishments to which mere mortals are regularly subjected and subjecting themselves.”

Sam Marroquin Amputee (2025)

French philosopher Frédéric Gros’s A Philosophy of Shame approaches shame from the psychological perspective of the individual at the intersection with society, inextricably linked. Shame can be instilled by being assigned an inferior place in a hierarchy – there are plenty of “shame-generating frameworks” like stigmatisation, stereotyping, and inferiorisation by mechanisms of race, gender and class, or sexualized violence. We internalize that these relegations are our fault, and correspondingly feel shame rather than disgust for the perpetrators. In this sense, shame silences, subjugates and damages.

However, the philosopher also believes that there is an element of anger and rage in shame, which will, if we turn it against us, be very destructive. If I look at massacres of civilian populations, for example, I might be enraged, ashamed at my powerlessness to do anything about it. Often, and particularly if I am implicated by association with a perpetrating nation or group, that shame might convince me to close my eyes towards the cruelty committed in my name. It is simply too overwhelming to feel the shame, so I blind myself to the facts.

Yet, and this is the core message of the book, shame can also spark positive action. It might become an “ethical” shame where we project ourselves into a future reflecting on actions that would or would not shame us. Shame can be a stimulant, in other words, for imagining possible worlds and behaviors promoting desired outcomes. We live in a culture that ver much wants to distract us from assessing the ethical standards involved in the nation’s actions. The author’s prescription: “A proper response to shame has the potential to draw our attention to injustices or moral failings instead, and rouse us to resist and attack the status quo.”

Shame can rouse conscience in some way, then, just as Marroquin’s work does by relentlessly reflecting a reality that questions the morality of our actions, even as remote bystanders. We have choices: to look at suffering or not; to avoid complicated conversations or not; to support those in need or not; to make our voices heard or not.

To imagine a better world, or support the status quo.

If shame works as a catalyst toward defying shamelessness: bring it on!

***

‘When the World Looks Away’

Sam Marroquin
Jan. 5–Jan. 30, 2026

Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. 

Artist Talk: Wednesday, January 14th from noon to 1pm.

Alexander Gallery is located in the Niemeyer Center at Clackamas
Community College.

19600 Molalla Avenue
Oregon City, Oregon 97045



Sam Marroquin World’s Child (2025)

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Taking stock of the body

· New work by Kate Simmons at the Alexander Gallery at CCC. ·

British artist Helen Chadwick fought much of her life, a life cut short way too early, against society’s demands for idealized female bodies, particularly with advancing age. She was a vanguard in pointing out double-standards for gender-related expectations for femininity, but also in her use of materials that related directly to the body, often in constellations that mixed beauty with repulsive features. She managed to take traditional symbols and distort them in surreal arrangements that tended to shock, some time before shock had become a staple in the arts, now used intentionally. A memorable example is her 1991 back-lit cibachrome photograph of blond hair intertwined with a pig’s intestines.

Helen Chadwick Loop My Loop, (1991) Cibachrome transparency, glass, steel, electrical apparatus

Chadwick popped into my thoughts when I visited Kate Simmons’ current exhibition Landscapes and Surfaces at CCC’s Alexander Gallery, thoughts likely triggered by both the issue of physicality and bodily decline that is the focus of much of the work in the show, and the use of human hair in one of its large pieces.

The exhibition consists of cast plaster sculptures, an assembly of glass cloches filled with melted and cold shocked aluminum, a video and an installation of felted wool and spun human hair. It is blissfully not overcrowded, allowing the separate artworks enough room to breathe. It also, important in the context of teaching at a college, manages to combine works created with diverse techniques, allowing her students who might see this a discussion about processes as well as the artistic impulses behind the art.

Kate Simmons and Sierra St. James Senescence (2023) 2 minute 26 second single channel collaborative experimental video.

A video, Senescence, created by Sierra St. James and Kate Simmons, displays overlaid images of seasonal impressions of nature and an exploration of the artist’s body. Hints of the deterioration starting in mid-life make a point about the cyclical nature of it all. Its poignant and at times disquieting message, was, alas, undermined by music composed specifically for this piece. The music itself was fine, but bore no relation to the content of the images, and, if anything, diluted them with a melodious sentimentality that offset the visuals which were wistful, but never sentimental.

When you enter the gallery your gaze is drawn to two large plaster casts of the artist’s head, one upright, the other in recline, both sprouting thorny rose canes made of bronze, with carved wooden leaves. Given the strange pairing of two representational shapes, the heads and the briars, my immediate association was to Sleeping Beauty, if you remember the Brother Grimm’s fairy tale. Here she is now, fully engulfed by the hedge of thorns surrounding the castle, a violent merger between landscape and body, the latter no longer amenable to princely rescue attempts. Turns out, it was an expression of a more personal symbolism, the affliction with Rosacea, a long-term inflammatory skin condition that causes reddened skin and a rash, usually on the nose and cheeks and often appears out of nowhere in times of stress – middle-age no exception, given that the heat of hot flashes is exacerbating the condition.

Kate Simmons Passage (2023) Cast plaster, cast bronze, carved plywood, epoxy, string and acrylic paint. (with details)

Record of Form, a series of five individual cast plaster forms pulled from the artist’s body, spoke to me more, perhaps due to the fact that no immediate interpretation distracts from the perceiving of the abstract beauty of partial bodily shapes. They could be anything, really. Shell fragments, rock formations, shaped horizons, or the crumbling of arthritic joints, worn down discs, sagging forms – it does not matter. Light and shadow, sharp lines, assembled variations – they all work visually without the need for representation, just testament to something physical having been captured and enshrined, a self contained presence.

Kate Simmons Record of Form (2023) Cast Plaster

Two glass cloches at the other side of the room hold strangely formed accumulations of aluminum that was melted and then poured into cold water in Landscapes and Surfaces. My immediate reaction, as will be the ones of my German readers, was to think back to New Year’s eves when a German custom has you heat up balls of lead or pewter over a candle in a spoon, and then pour the liquid into bowls of water. The resulting shapes are interpreted with the help of party-favor handbooks, predicting your future, not unlike fortune cookies, in the year to come. Simmons’ aluminum configurations were larger, bubblier, and looked more substantial under the cloches, but invited speculation as well. Is it cooled lava, is it an accumulation of cancer cells, is it salmon roe, is it bubbles in a waterfall? Landscape or body imagery were equally applicable, and I just regretted that the word body was not part of the exhibition title, to help with the connections that she framed in her artist statement, the parallels she wishes to draw.

Kate Simmons Landscapes and Surfaces (2023) Glass cloches and aluminum.

Extended across a wall opposite of the video screen is a large wall hanging comprised of two overlapping, hand-felted wool fleeces with lines of hand spun human hair appliquéd. From her statement:

This work calls attention to macro appearances of landscape topography while juxtaposing micro appearances of human skin or flesh. Mountains and ravines mimic micro textures of wrinkles and crepey qualities of skin as time evolves changing the landscape and the human body. Spun human hair and wool make connections between living creatures. The linear stitched decoration inspires associations to waterways and human vascular systems.

It does all that, but also calls up disquieting associations about the use of hair in very different settings. Which, by the way, is a good thing, even though it made me uncomfortable, because the art invites historical perspectives, and goes beyond the surface, even though surface is the hook it has us hang these thoughts on. Incidentally, I had recently written about the cultural role of hair in the context of artists processing cancer. Here I am back with some thoughts on hair as material used both in everyday settings and artists’ work.

Kate Simmons Erosion (2023) Wool and human hair.

During the Holocaust, concentration camp inmates were shorn of their hair before they were killed in the gas chambers. The hair was was cleaned in an ammoniac solution, dried, and stored in paper bags. It was shipped to German factories for profit, paid by the pound, and used by industry to manufacture ropes, carpets, mattress stuffing, and socks for submarine crews as well as time-bombs. One of the largest German companies for auto parts, Schaeffler, (still dominating the market and being one of the wealthiest families in Germany today) used the hair of 40.000 or more camp inmates to manufacture textiles. Hair has taken on a symbolic role in much of the post-holocaust attempts to work through the horrors of fascism, with Anselm Kiefer and Gideon Gechtman probably being the most familiar names in that arena.

Today, it is reported that China, the largest exporter of human hair in the world, is using both the hair of inmates in Uyghur internment camps and camp labor to provide the world market with natural hair to make wigs and extensions, or other object to the tune of U.S. $1.8 billion in exports to the U.S. alone.

Kate Simmons Erosion (2023) Wool and human hair. Detail

In earlier times, from the Biedermeier period and the Victorian period up to the Second World War, hair was processed as braided and bobbin-laced hair jewelry, into friendship-, mourning- and traditional costume jewelry, as well as into hair locks as keepsakes.

More recently many artists have taken up the significance of hair, sometimes, for example, as a racial marker, in societies where racism prevails. David Hammons used found hair around the same time as Chadwick constructed her golden locks, to alert to aspects of Black culture and our reaction to it, like in this piece that has hair wrapped around wire turn into a semblance of dreadlocks.

Bodily hair is often associated with shame and sexualization. Artists like Palestinian born, London based Mona Hatoum have used (pubic) hair to draw our attention to the way women are forced to accommodate male tastes, but also head hair to the more general issue of human trafficking of young females.

And then there is Gu Wenda, born in Shanghai and now based in NYC, who estimates he has collected the hair of 5 million people for his artworks, installations titled United Nations that are partly shown right now at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA. The artist takes hair and other bodily materials to create similes of the flags representing the member states of the United Nations, reflecting the properties similar to all humans across space delineated by borders. Someone called it a “new form of mysticism and a great utopia of unification.” I would not go there, but the work certainly impresses with how a concept is actually instantiated with unimaginable labor.

Hair as representative of a society bent on categorizing and stifling women, symbol of shame as much as beauty, hair that singles out racial identity or is labeled a uniting factor – where does this leave us with respect to Simmons’ work?

The concept presented in this show lodges around the surfaces and structures of a human body exposed to aging. Parallels drawn to nature’s cycles emphasize the inescapable rhythms of biology. Hair is, of course, a vivid reminder of the elapse of our allotted time: across the years it looses its color, it changes its density and weakens its structure, eventually thinning to the point of no return, with baldness for many the result. The multi-colored strands of hair juxtaposed with the densely matted fleeces, animal hair regularly shorn and growing back in cycles as well, proffers the understanding that we are all part of natural processes. Its visual appearance on the topological hills and valleys of the background is indeed one of veins and arteries (if you think human) or rivulets and rivers, if you’re settled on landscape.

Kate Simmons Erosion (2023) Wool and human hair. Detail

Hair, if not our own, found in unexpected places and configurations, is sometimes associated with disgust. The long hair in the butter dish or the short hair in the sink and shower drain are irritants. Hand spun into the threads, clumped and stretched as we see it in Erosion, it might (or might not) cause similar reactions. I applaud the decision to ignore that possibility and use hair as object, because it is one of the few actual human materials that lend themselves to preservation and bring a piece of us into the world without the need to be represented by something else. If the artist’s ideas circle around us and the world intersecting, exposed to the same pressures, then this is an interesting way to go. The exhibition as a whole serves as a great starting point to think through physical fragility.

Music today is one of the pinnacles of acceptance of aging: the Marschallin in Strauss’ Rosenkavalier sings about the strangeness of time. Still one of my favorite arias of all times.

Kate Simmons Erosion (2023) Wool and human hair. Detail

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