FREEwilliamsburg: Simon Evans, Living on "Island Time"

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In artist Simon Evans' world, the stories that we tell ourselves are the most important part and often the only way that we can find meaning in where we’ve been, where we are and where we might wind up eventually. His appropriately named exhibit, “Island Time,” showing at the James Cohan Gallery through April 4th, hints at the loneliness inherent in life when home becomes nothing but a reconstructed memory. We’re left searching for an allusive sense of belonging and purpose in an entirely new place and all we’ve got is a nearly endless succession of days ahead.

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Luckily for us, while voluntarily “stranded” in his adopted city of Berlin, Evans found inspiration in his isolation, producing a collection of intricate pieces that combine elements of writing, collage and drawing to create an engaging display of diagrams, maps, diary entries, lists and inventories. These pieces serve as slow meditations on our relationships to the ideas, people and objects that populate the world in which we live. Evans' repetition of themes and phrases throughout the show are simultaneously reminiscent of religious mantras -- "Repeated words turn into idols" -- and the obsessive ramblings of a person with no company save their own echo. This decision seems particularly appropriate, considering that when time ceases to be a factor, the process and the details arguably take on greater significance than the act of completion. After all, who's going to see them anyway?

And while the scope of this exhibit may seem like a lot of psychological weight to hang on a gallery wall, Evans approaches his work with enough self-effacing humor -- "To Do List: Define All Things, Live Forever, Fall In Love With Another Immortal" -- to more than balance out the sentimentality. This removes the pieces from the realms of the too personal and touches on the universal, inviting us to linger longer and examine them more deeply before drawing our own conclusions. Which when there’s no one else around to tell us otherwise, should be the whole point of the exercise anyway.

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