Noah Simblist: Protocols of Zion
October 29 through December 1 2007
Noah Simblist is an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University and has taught at SMU since 2003. Simblist’s work involves paintings, drawings, video, wall text and sound installations that explore the limits of symbolic meaning in political, religious and quasi-religious modernist iconography.
He has exhibited at Garner Tullis in New York, the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Commerce Street Artist Warehouse in Houston, and the 2007 Texas Biennial in Austin, and in Dallas at The Dallas Contemporary, The McKinney Avenue Contemporary, And/Or Gallery and Gray Matters Gallery.
For this exhibition, Simblist will create a fictional organization of Christian Zionists called the New Elders of Zion. The exhibition will include a manifesto modeled on the real anti-Semitic text The Protocols of Zion. It will also include fabricated documents about the group’s activities and a set of drawings the group has made to map out the various stages of the end times.
The mission of this fictional group is to borrow strategies from avant-garde artists of the early 20th century to further the cause of the Jews returning to the land of Israel, for their enemies to be vanquished and for the second coming of Christ to occur in the next few years.
In conjunction with the exhibition, a panel discussion will be held in the gallery on Thursday, November 29, from 5 to 7 p.m. entitled The Jerusalem Syndrome: One City at the Crossroads of Faith and Human Rights. The discussion will include students and faculty (Rick Halperin, Adjunct Lecturer and Director of the Human Rights Education program in the History Department, and Mark Chancey, Associate Professor of Religious Studies) from the SMU community who are concerned with the relationships between Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities.
The Pollock Gallery, Southern Methodist University, is open Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday from 1 to 5 p.m. Closed Wednesdays except by appointment. For more information please call 214-768-4439 or e-mail pvankeur@smu.edu.
