by Paul Zimmerman
In his exhibition at Artifact Projects, artist Sim Moby examines themes of sameness and difference, separation and unity, free will and instinct, destiny and fate. His work is driven by an interest in emergent energy, using visual metaphors to explore causality, human agency, and the complex relationships between dependence, interdependence, and independence. Moby creates immersive, game-like spaces inhabited by floating, biomorphic and angular abstracted forms whose porous surfaces invite viewers to look inward, revealing intimate and enclosed interior worlds. These drifting configurations suggest a culture untethered from logic, where rationality appears incidental and natural laws seem suspended.
The work is challenging and psychologically charged, appearing to portray fragmented states of consciousness suspended in uncertainty. It embraces unpredictability and instability, presenting a weightless, disoriented world in which forms seem both protected and exposed. The womb-like yet permeable structures evoke the anxiety of existing adrift within vast dimensions of time and space, while also conveying a strange exhilaration. At the same time, this openness implies vulnerability — the awareness of being visible and subject to the scrutiny of others. Moby’s practice ultimately explores the possibility of transcending ordinary experience and entering a state of non-separation, where self and environment dissolve into one another.
Through these works, Sim Moby offers a vision of an emerging world layered with contradictory internal dimensions. His compositions question the nature of spatial experience itself, suggesting that space is not fixed but constantly shifting. More significantly, he proposes that this dynamism is fundamental to consciousness — that the world becomes perceptible and meaningful precisely through this continuous movement and transformation.