About
I need to connect to Newfoundland; to belong to its landscape; to understand its isolation, harshness, and it's history. I long for this land. To trace its history with my footprints; for it to become a memory on the soles of my feet. This island knows me. It knows my presence. I want it to consume me, to own me. Newfoundland has a magnetic core that draws me in yet pushes me away. I want to walk all over its history; to stomp on it; to rewrite it; to be present to places that history has tried to erase; to challenge globalization and its lack of consideration for the local. I am unsettled and I am resettled.
Adam Simms is a Canadian photographer who uses video, sound, and microelectronics to create immersive installations. His work contemplates the long-lasting effects on the Newfoundland identity since the province joined Canada in 1949. By highlighting intangible culture, such as dialect, Adam ensures that the quintessential Newfoundland way of life persists. The resettlement of Adam’s grandmother from Pinchard’s Island under the 1960s centralization program is a thread that weaves in and out of his work. Through his family’s history, Adam draws parallels to global issues of displacement, investigating which aspects of culture are portable and which are rooted in place.
Much of Adam’s work literally transmit aspects of the Newfoundland vernacular and landscape to unexpected locations. In the immersive installation Cabin (2017), Adam transformed a Montreal studio space into a traditional Newfoundland cabin. This installation included a live video stream from Cloudberry (2017), in which a solar-powered camera mounted on the family cabin on Pinchard’s Island captures and broadcasts the window view via a cellular network, allowing the landscape to be experienced from anywhere. In the kinetic sculpture Driftwood (2018), a microelectronic system receives transmissions of live data from a buoy in the Atlantic ocean off the coast of Newfoundland. The electronics translate the data into motion, enabling the driftwood to respond in real-time to the movement of the ocean. The video and sound performance piece Mug Up (2018), a collaboration between Adam and his grandmother Doris, refers to the ritual of taking a break for tea and snacks. By extracting the tradition from the architecture of the home to be performed outdoors on Little Bay Islands, a recently resettled community, Adam creates continuity between the past and the present.
Adam has participated in solo and group exhibitions and public art installations across Canada, including at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Occurrence and KaVieArt. His work has been published in Ciel Variable, Riddle Fence, The Goose, Headlight Anthology and Photographer’s FORUM.
Adam received a BFA in Design and an MFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University. He is currently a member of the Milieux Post Image Cluster and divides his time between Montreal and Newfoundland.