The image of Coreen Simpson’s goddaughter Alva, part of the multifaceted artist’s collage and experimentation period from a long-running series of photographs she calls Aboutface, flirts with Surrealism, inserting a Black woman figure into a largely white male tradition. In Surrealism, clocks represent the fluidity of time, the subjective nature of memory and dreams, and the decay of conventional reality. As Salvador Dalí depicted melting clocks to symbolize how time bends and distorts in the subconscious, inspired by a dream and his observation of Camembert cheese melting in the sun, Simpson reimagines both art history and human history, amplifying the Black figure.
