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bio...
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John F. Simon, Jr.
Career Narrative
I have been producing art professionally for almost 20 years beginning with hand and pen plotter drawings and progressing through Internet Art to finally arrive at my own practice of 'coding as creative writing'. The main way that I show my Software Art is through sculptural wall hangings with LCD screens that I call 'art appliances' and have made and sold since 1999. I also make drawings and paintings daily in the 'traditional' media of gouache and pencil.
Color Panel v1.0, my first 'art appliance' was published as an edition of 12 and shown at the Sandra Gering Gallery in New York in 1999. It was acquired at that time by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Shortly after, my premier piece of Internet based Software Art, called 'Every Icon', was included in the 2000 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. My work was shown again at the Whitney Museum in 2001 in their survey of computer-based work 'BitStreams'. This show included large-scale versions of earlier software works now titled Color Panel v1.5 and CPU v1.5.
I have shown new work with the Sandra Gering Gallery regularly for 14 years (it recently expanded and is now the Gering & Lopez Gallery). I had had my 7th solo show there in the Fall of 2007. My work has international exposure including large surveys like Media City Seoul 2002 (Seoul, Korea) and Flower Power at the Musee des Beaus-Arts in Lille, France. And most recently I will have a solo show in Galeria Javier Lopez, 2008 ( Madrid, Spain) and a retrospective with a catalog at Collezione Maramotti, 2009, (Bologna, Italy).
I have received numerous commissions in varied media. 'Unfolding Object'(2001) was commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum. In 2002 the Business Committee for the Arts commissioned me to design and produce a limited edition print. I fabricated the edition out of laser cut acrylic. It was titled 'Closed Circuit' and is now in the print collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. By far my largest commission and work is 'Channels', a 116-foot long permanent installation for the University of Iowa College of Medicine completed in 2002. This piece incorporates laser cut Formica and six large monitors with custom Software Art.
Other highpoints and awards include the Trustees Award for an Emerging Artist that I received from The Aldrich Museum for Contemporary Art in 2000 and my 1999 Creative Capital New Media Grant. An edition of laser-cut plastic-acrylic drawings, Two Rivers, was published by The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in 2005 and in 2006 my artist book and software, "Mobility Agents" was published by The Whitney Museum of American Art and Printed Matter Bookstore in New York.
I continue to produce new software panel artworks each year and am lucky enough to have them acquired by museums. In addition to those stated previously, my Software Art Appliances can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Ulrich Museum of Art, The Tweed Museum of Art, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery among many others.
