BIO
BIO
Simpson's current series explores the unstable boundaries between reverence and distortion, beauty and grotesque. He uses artificial intelligence as both collaborator and accomplice, feeding it the revered imagery of Old Master paintings and asking it to betray them. These canonical works—once upheld as pinnacles of human achievement—are disassembled, reconfigured, and reanimated into monstrous, puppet-like forms.
The AI functions like a mischievous puppeteer, pulling at the threads of cultural memory, twisting familiar figures into uncanny bodies that sag, fracture, and mutate. What was once harmonious composition becomes dissonant anatomy; gestures of divine grace curdle into spasms of awkward, broken motion. By staging these disfigured “puppets” on the digital stage, Simpson aims to make visible the fragility of tradition and the violence inherent in recontextualization.
These images are not simply parodies or corruptions—they are mirrors, reflecting how history is endlessly manipulated, curated, and deformed by the tools of its transmission. The Old Masters themselves borrowed, copied, and remixed, though within the constraints of their time. Today, AI extends that lineage of transformation, revealing how easily mastery dissolves into monstrosity when mediated through machine perception.
In this work, monstrosity is generative. The grotesque puppets are not failures of representation but revelations of it: they expose the stitches holding together ideals of beauty, power, and permanence. By pulling at those threads, Simpson hopes to provoke unease, curiosity, and critical reflection—inviting viewers to see both the Old Masters and contemporary technology in a different light, as unstable constructs that shape, and warp, our shared imagination.