About
Artist Statement
I need to connect to Newfoundland. To belong to its landscape. To understand its isolation, its harshness, and its history. I long for this land. To trace its past with my footprints, for it to become a memory on the soles of my feet. I want to be present in 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.
I work with photography, video, sound, and microelectronics to ask how place, identity, and intangible culture persist after resettlement, out-migration, and distance. My practice begins from Ktaqmkuk / Newfoundland, a North Atlantic island that joined Canada in 1949, and from a position inside and outside that history: I am from the island, and years away have made me an outsider.
A central thread is my grandmother’s resettlement from Pinchard’s Island under mid-century government resettlement and centralization programs. With nothing of the original community left, a core question has shaped my work: how do I represent a place that no longer exists? Earlier projects collapsed distance by transmitting landscape, weather, dialect, and vernacular architectures into other rooms and cities, so presence could be partial and remote.
I am less interested in a finished image of home than in what is lost or distorted when place is moved. My current research turns to incomplete belonging and incomplete speech: records that revise themselves and refuse fluent description. The installations, transmissions, and images I make are built to hold that tension.
Biography
Adam Simms is a Canadian media artist who uses photography, video, and microelectronics to create immersive installations. His work often moves landscape and the vernacular between remote sites and unexpected locations, with a focus on belonging, displacement, and intangible culture. His practice also examines the lasting effects on Newfoundland identity since the province joined Canada in 1949. 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, he 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 transmits aspects of the Newfoundland vernacular and landscape to unexpected locations. In the immersive installation Cabin (2017-2018), he transformed a Montreal studio into a traditional Newfoundland cabin, including a live video stream from Cloudberry (2017-2018), a solar-powered camera on the family cabin on Pinchard’s Island that broadcasts the window view over a cellular network. In the kinetic sculpture Driftwood (2018), microelectronics receive live buoy data from the Atlantic Ocean off Newfoundland and translate it into motion. The video and sound performance Mug Up (2018), a collaboration with his grandmother Doris, restages the ritual of taking a break for tea outdoors on Little Bay Islands, a recently resettled community.
Adam has exhibited 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.
He received a BFA in Design and an MFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University, and is a member of the Milieux Post Image Cluster. He is currently creating an off-grid, networked field rover with a camera system and a language model that writes observational field notes based on fragmentary language.
Adam is based between Tiohtià:ke / Montreal and Ktaqmkuk / Newfoundland.
