FRIDAY, AUGUST 28, 2026 (San Antonio, Texas) 

TRISH SIMONITE (San Antonio, Texas)
Exquisite Entropy
Photographs 1972 – 2025
Curated By Paula Owen
Presented by UTSA Arts and UT San Antonio School Of Art
Russell Hill Rogers Galleries
Santikos Building – UTSA Southwest Campus
1201 Navarro Street, San Antonio, TX 78205
art.events@utsa.edu | https://arts.utsa.edu

Opening reception: Friday, August 28, 2026, 6 – 8 pm
Artist talk: Saturday, September 26, 2026, 1 – 3 pm
Exhibit on display: August 28 – October 3, 2026
Viewing hours: Thu – Sat, 12 – 5 pm
Contact: Breanna Castillo, breanna.castillo@utsa.edu
Free and open to the public

In the Pentland Hills outside of Edinburgh is an enchanting landscape of sculptural installations by the artist Ian Hamilton Finlay, including a work of massive stones laying in the grass, each with one word carved into the top: THE PRESENT ORDER IS THE DISORDER OF THE FUTURE. Attributed to Saint Just, this admonition echoes a central theme of the fifty some years of photographs by Trish Simonite. She is drawn to subjects that reflect the randomness of physical change and decay found in the man-made and natural worlds, and this principle concern is unwavering despite varying formal elements, locations, and subject matter. 

Having grown up in England, she acknowledges a British sensibility and employs an embodied respect for history and the passage of time to explore her subjects. Whether botanical, architectural, or prosaic, her works often refer to the past: a past glory, a past use, a past civilization. What is as remarkable, however, is the enigmatic beauty she finds and/or appends to the image by technical manipulation, due to her skillful consideration of formal elements of color, texture, light, and composition. It is also derived from her ability to create a distinctive mood through perspective and atmospherics such as haze, shadow, and double exposure. The works regularly project a quality of intentional approach or stillness in which the viewer is beckoned into a darkened foreground that opens up to a light-filled interior or distant land or seascape.

Often, she layers images to convey both past and present, revealing the evolving and metaphorical nature of reality expressed through her deft handling of formal and narrative choices. In Curtains, Happisburgh, a bygone era is suggested by the dated pattern of the curtains in a picture window layered over a view of the sunless and uninviting beach. In Hidden Histories, a deteriorating rock wall is superimposed over the landscape telling a story of centuries of use. Likewise, the double exposures of jawbone, amphorae, and shell over views of several coastlines communicate the timelessness of nature no matter how ancient or rich the civilization. 

The exhibition’s title, Exquisite Entropy, reflects the unmistakable essence of Simonite’s work. Referring to a state of being studied primarily in cosmology and physics where it is a measure of chaos or uncertainty, entropy suggests that all systems, natural or constructed, bend toward entropy because it requires less energy or effort. Simonite draws inspiration from this truth to express a philosophical or existential stance, but also because she is attracted by the aesthetic qualities of transformation. In Franziska, for instance, she finds beauty and pathos in the once full rose petals, darkening and curling. 

Even in those works that do not include obvious deterioration or decay, Simonite chooses to tell us a story of transformation, sometimes through actual or implied absence. In the series taken on the Norfolk coast at Yarmouth Beach, she reflects on the place where she spent summers as a young girl, emphasizing vastness and emptiness. She says that she has begun to think of these images as being about her own absence as much as her presence. By framing the foregrounds with colorful signs implying the gaiety of a beach holiday but also emphasizing the distant horizon and deserted sand and sea, she intensifies our own contemplative arc.  

Though she seldom includes people in her pieces, the elderly man having tea alone outside his beach cabin evokes palpable melancholy, and in Wendy Lying Down, a field of lush grass overlays a youthful girl wearing a white dress, both works intimating the cyclical nature of life in its vibrancy and loss. Likewise, seldom does even a boat appear in the many expansive sea views, implying a dreamy but improbable infinity. Empty chairs await at Gregor’s House and on the street in Seville. A lopsided bench in a deserted courtyard and an old mattress propped up against a corrugated fence are unlikely subjects, among the many images emphasizing corporeal impermanence.  

In part because the reality captured by the camera is transient, photography is a master of paradox. The youth will age, the leaf will shrivel, the sunlight will never fall in such a way again, the stone wall will crumble, the door will fall off its hinges. Simonite spotlights these contradictions and does so with an aesthetically elegant eye. Her works stir awareness of the tenuousness of our material world and mortal selves, reminding us that while we too must submit to entropy, the process is often exquisite. –Paula Owen

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