May 25, 2005 — A knock on our door and a letter telling us there's been a family tragedy. Who? We don't know until we check our e-mail. Then, standing on a street corner only blocks from Masaccio's grieving Adam and Eve, Lance and I mourn our nephew. Later that night, we take the kids for gelato along the Arno as promised earlier and I see another woman, tourist like myself, sobbing against a friend's shoulder. How will she or we enjoy anything again?

Somehow Biggs Larsen managed to create convincing, intelligent, artful compositions from these thoughts for each of her family's 365-day journey. "I know 365 images is a lot," she said. "Some people might say I shouldn't show them all at once. But there are 365 days every year and we experience them all."

Simpson, whose life was upended this past year (she was diagnosed with breast cancer and ended a long-term relationship), gives viewers a chance to participate in her very personal, thought-provoking exploration of life's inconsistencies and inequities. With more than a dozen digital montages, she has created layer upon layer of imagery that is both universal and intensely individual.

After taking time to re-evaluate her life, Simpson began the project by developing old film she'd left in her refrigerator for two years: film of her ex-boyfriend and her on one of their last trips together to Europe. "I decided to look at this with the new eyes of experience."

The resulting installation — especially the free-hanging works printed on silk — navigates viewers through her problems/solutions, but not without making us traverse the stormy seas of her symbolism.

Of necessity, gallery goers should peruse Simpson's artist statement before entering her installation. This revelatory and candid essay explains much about Simpson's apprehensions and garnered philosophy of life and art. The reading will help in deciphering her symbols.

"I gave myself certain parameters, that the actual objects in each image would come from looking around my home, at things I collect," said Simpson. "A lot of it had to do with me wanting to bring nature in and couple it with my experiences, my trip to Europe and the art I was appreciating, the things that bring me comfort now."

Within the layered imagery, she discovered new images, and those images had to do with feelings she was experiencing, such as despair, hope, suspension and escape.

Simpson wanted to show in her art process an organic nature as opposed to a more intellectual nature, which required her cutting and pasting images, a technique she'd used many times before. With an overlapping of images she showed "how things accidentally juxtapose themselves with each other."