META-MORPHOSES Limited Editions by Miss Al Simpson

“Meta-morphoses” is an exploration of the glitching transformation of centralized fiat to decentralized crypto currency, presented by Miss Al Simpson’s Three Graffiti Graces…”Old Money”, “Cash Slave and “Bitcoin Bitch”.

The journey starts with corruption of Old Money, posing outside that symbol of centralized fiat, the New Stock Exchange. She leans heavily on its outdated structure, as the old system starts to corrupt. We then move to the casino of the Cash Slave, spinning her luck on the symbols of money and wealth. She stares at us, hoping to impress, but forever corrupted by a slavery to centralized power.

The journey ends in the techno nightclub of the Bitcoin Bitch. She stands, arrogant and powerful, with her back to the viewer, no longer concerned with impressing others with false symbols of wealth IRL. She stares into the Meta, mesmerised by the glitching power and potential of decentralization. Money has come full circle, no longer created by centralized banks, it is now created through the blockchain and will change the world.”

“If Anna Louise Simpson's digital collages look familiar, it's because they mine the coincident streams of pre-pandemic consumer culture, the iconography of luxury fashion brands that suffused our sub-conscious before the virus made all that redundant, and the ripped-up fragments of a post-punk sensibility that critics keep telling us is no longer relevant but which, somehow, continues to resonate, especially in these uncertain days.

"Her art is, at once, salvage and salve, a cut-and-paste recovery of a conflicted self — not emotional repair but psychic re-invention — replicating the ambient decay of the dour Scottish inner-city urban environment in which she lives and works, its tattered, defaced textures not so much a canvas as the absence of one, which she is compelled to repopulate with idealised and yes, sexualised figures and inanimate objects of desire/nostalgia culled from magazines — already anachronisms in a relentlessly digitalised culture — almost as if to ease the collective anxiety of an age at a loss. "As artist and arbiter, Anna Louise Simpson is a guide through this age, her found art a cartography of sorts, but not always to be relied upon.” -C.C. O'HANLON

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