Artist: Fin Simonetti

Albion Jeune presents I’m Already an Actor, an exhibition of new work by Fin Simonetti (b. 1985, Vancouver), displaying stone sculpture alongside Simonetti's first exhibition of paintings. In an uncharacteristically personal body of work, Simonetti grapples with themes of agency, cruelty, and the mechanics of anthropomorphisation.

While recovering from a serious injury, Simonetti found herself unable to make sculpture; a period the artist refers to as the “Dark Ages". Estranged from her body, she turned to painting in private—initially depicting sculptures that she was unable to make. Over time, a distinct body of work emerged, establishing a new material channel in her practice.

The title I'm Already an Actor originated as a recurring intrusive thought Simonetti had when she began painting. Incomplete and potentially defensive, initially it’s meaning was elusive. When the bunny motif migrated from her sculpture into two-dimensions, something strange happened: whereas in her sculpture, the bunny interrogates anthropomorphisation, in painting, Simonetti is animating emotion, implicating herself within her own framework. While Simonetti’s sculptural works often engage with how security is negotiated in public space, in painting, that vulnerability enters first person. The phrase also alludes to Simonetti’s performance of identity as an artist—a concept she confronted during the “Dark Ages,” as her self-perception as a sculptor dissolved with her physical abilities.

Simonetti engages with animals processed through human systems of meaning, viewed along a spectrum from anthropomorphised to objectified. Held simultaneously, these lenses negate each other, while pointing to an absence at the center: the actual animal. In this context, the bunny has been symbolically metabolised to abstraction. Divorced from specificity, it becomes an empty and infinitely flexible vessel. This logic manifests formally in the paintings, where bunny shapes recur with subtle variation, and break down into abstractions. Blocks of colour are separated by thin lines, like solder around panels of stained glass. Simonetti's paintings are made with no source material aside from previous paintings, creating a self- referential and autopoietic vocabulary.

Simonetti approaches cuteness as a subtle form of cruelty, in which value is ascribed hierarchically across species, rewarding a proximity to humans. Cuteness is deployed manipulatively as a lure (here the artist connects to Lisa Yuskavage’s antagonistic early paintings). Undermining their status as vulnerable prey animals, Simonetti's bunnies flex hyperbolic and slightly demented muscles. The tip of the bunnies’ ears end in flames, their legs elongate into matches. It is not clear if the flame is a threat (and if so, to us or them?).

Reflecting the “Dark Ages” is a sculptural work in which a candle burns through a marble chair, enacting hostile architecture on a personal scale. Contrasting previous sculptures of bleachers and benches, the chair is solitary and domestic. This tension between cruelty and humour continues in a series of hand-carved stone pacifiers backed with lock shackles. Here, Simonetti uses stone manipulatively, creating objects that appear soft and appealing like candy, but would crack your teeth. Across these works, Simonetti proposes a world imbued with ambient danger, while her candle sculptures consider the tension between fire as both potential threat and source of domestic warmth.

Fin Simonetti (b. 1985, Vancouver) is a Canadian artist and musician based in New York. Simonetti received her BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 2009. Her work examines the entangled relationship between measures of control and desires for security. Simonetti uses imagery that is designed to tap into our visceral fears and conceptually moves between rendering sculptural forms that represent both protection and vulnerability. The artist’s frequent use of stained glass references its history as a common trade amongst Italian immigrants in Canada, including the artist’s own family.