GINNY SIMS // Postcards from the Night
On view May 17–June 15, 2025
Opening reception Saturday, May 17 (3–5pm)
Nationale is delighted to welcome Minneapolis-based ceramicist Ginny Sims for her first exhibition with the gallery. On view in the front space, Postcards from the Night explores the free association between a creative mind at rest and at attention. Sims likens the jumble of past experiences, interactions, dreams, and memories to the frenzied and passionate process of making art. She states, dreams are free theatre…and to bring up a dream is to empty the room. She empties the room through the physical act of mark-making, creating alternate universes in clay, collage, and painting in which she and her audience can ruminate on the magic of dreams and lived experiences. I hold onto dreams dearly, and so I live twice—in this way, Sims makes meaning in uncertain times.
A small ceramic white clock rests atop a yellow pedestal, hands askew and the hours distorted, a subtle nod to the malleability of time. A maquette displays the likeness of an older gentleman smoking from an Italian movie recently enjoyed by the artist. Bright water pitchers and matching tea cups boast pastel vignettes with enough context to allude to far away realms and imagined landscapes. In others, you can see images that convey lines from an Etel Adnan poem. Alongside sculptural candelabras and figural forms, Sims sets elaborate interior scenes fragmented like a mysterious and emotional dream. Postcards from the Night is a composite offering of work, evident in the layers that touch on meaningful personal histories, people, moments, and stories. It reads like a distorted timeline of truths and fictions and invites viewers to use their purest form of imagination. There is a woman, a love, a fig tree, a light in the street. There is war, the ocean, death, the sky floats by. In that delight of uncertainty grows an unrelenting hope.
Ginny Sims was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. She works primarily in clay and often incorporates other materials and found objects in her installations for supportive context for her sculptures and vessels. Sims has worked at potteries in Centola, Italy, and Isle of Iona, Scotland. She has exhibited at numerous galleries in the US and Europe and has held solo shows at 0fr in Paris, France, and Hair and Nails gallery in Minneapolis, MN. Sims has been the recipient of numerous grants including Jerome Foundation Study and Travel Grant (2016), Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant (2017), Jerome Ceramic Artists Project Grant (2013, 2019), and McKnight Fellowship for Ceramic Artists (2022). Most recently she was awarded a 2025/26 Rome Prize fellowship in the field of Design.
The functional items are now sold out. We will send out a checklist of wall compositions next week. To receive the checklist once the show is photographed, please fill in the form below. Thank you.
PRESS & MORE
Things to Do in Portland this Week, Matthew Trueherz, Portland Monthly, May 15, 2025
Ginny Sims: Postcards from the Night, Lindsay Costello, EverOut, May 2025
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