Simon Evans™: Room to Live: GALLERY EXHIBITION AT 52 WALKER ST | MAR 4 - APR 1, 2023

Simon Evans™ is the artistic collaboration between Simon Evans and Sarah Lannan. Together, the New York-based artists create dense text-based collages brimming with poetic handwritten phrases, drawings, and images.
Room to Live, the artists' sixth exhibition with the gallery, features mixed-media collages and sculptural works that explore domestic spaces as arenas of play. Incorporating layers of collaged paper, text, and found items including detritus from their own lives, each of the works depict the cross-section of a dwelling--ranging from townhouse to condo to construction site to camper van--revealing an interior symbolic tableau. While certain objects point to the artists specifically, these spaces represent a universal experience: the daily and habitual patterns of life and domesticity, city living, and our fraught relationship with material belongings.
- SIMON EVANS ™, This American Dollhouse, 2021
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The first dollhouse of the exhibition, This American Dollhouse, depicts the cross-section of Simon Evans™'s Brooklyn apartment with some Lego reductioning to lend the appearance of a toy apartment. As the artists note, "the toy version of the world was a helpful way to feel honest." As one moves from the top floor to lower levels, the veneer of cleanliness and order—hidden from the eye of the all-seeing security camera—progressively erodes. A masked, costumed man stands in the kitchen with arms outstretched, acting out the frustration and confinement experienced during COVID-19 stay-at-home orders.
In the "sequel" of This American Dollhouse, Simon Evans™ fill their toy-version apartment with clever symbols about a world teetering on the edge of chaos.

In their basement studio space, a "murder wall" like one would find in a private investigator's office takes center stage. The wall displays connected "evidence" like newspaper clippings, a note reading "the guilty landscape of detective novels" at the center of a map of Manhattan, and miniature versions of the artists' own works.

In the kitchen and living room, the sink is dangerously close to overflowing, the oven is on fire, and a world map puzzle appears to be almost complete, with a few pieces remaining out of place. A bag of trash with the Life Magazine logo is propped up against the communal trash cans with the instruction "Get Used."
- SIMON EVANS ™, This American Dollhouse II (a soft reboot), 2022
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This American Dollhouse: Progress, 2023

"Where we live buildings are going up everywhere. It felt right and exciting to question progress from this building, another dollhouse / toy apartment.

It’s very material based, most of the structure’s materials are used in real construction–wood, cement, metal etc. It reminded us of how jobs are built into toys, a child being programmed for adult life."
- SIMON EVANS AND SARAH LANNAN, This American Dollhouse: Progress, 2023
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- SIMON EVANS AND SARAH LANNAN, This American Dollhouse Condominium, 2023
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"All the buildings are about home, belonging, belongings, which in our biography and everyone else’s is a big thing."
This American Dollhouse Storage, 2023

"In Storage, we labeled the boxes like people do with their things when moving them about, but instead of the particulars of the objects and places, we imagined the ridiculously bigger human things and themes behind them."
- SIMON EVANS AND SARAH LANNAN, This American Dollhouse Storage, 2023
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- SIMON EVANS ™, This American Dollhouse #vanlife, 2023
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"BARBIE RV IS A LOOK AT THE ONLINE LIVING/WORKING VAN LIFE THAT LEAVES MANY AMERICANS SHIPWRECKED, TRAPPED IN THEIR DREAMS NOW NIGHTMARES. ONLINE EVERYTHING’S GREAT, PROPAGATING THE LIE."
- SIMON EVANS ™, This American Dollhouse #vanlife, 2023
- SIMON EVANS AND SARAH LANNAN, a tomb, 2017
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In a tomb, the artists replicate Simon's childhood bedroom and belongings. The impetus for the work was his parents' sudden and dramatic split after forty years of marriage the previous year. While mourning this loss, Simon recalled a tender childhood memory when his mother helped him create an Egyptian tomb in a shoe box for school. Preserving an innocent moment in Simon's life, the work touches upon both intensely personal pasts and broader strokes of human history.
- SIMON EVANS AND SARAH LANNAN, a tomb, 2017
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- SIMON EVANS ™, Joan Didion Estate Sale, 2023
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- SIMON EVANS AND SARAH LANNAN, Insecurity Card, 2022
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Insecurity Card

Exposing the fallibility of American safety nets, the newest edition, Insecurity Card, asks an honest question of security, both personal and as a society. Created in multiple screens of red, white and blue, the artists recreate the traditional design of the American Social Security Card - creating the framework for a stage, alluding to the idea that security is just theatre, both a comedy and tragedy. Each edition has a unique hand applied serial number.
Checklist
- SIMON EVANS ™, Joan Didion Estate Sale, 2023
- SIMON EVANS AND SARAH LANNAN, Insecurity Card, 2022
  $ 900.00
Photo by Kristine Larsen

About

Simon Evans™ has exhibited extensively, both in the US and internationally. Significant solo museum exhibitions include Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, OH (2013); Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (MUDAM), Luxembourg (2012); Aspen Art Museum, CO (2005); and White Columns, New York (2005). Simon Evans™ was featured in the 12th International Istanbul Biennial in Turkey and the 27th São Paulo Biennial in Brazil. The artists' work has also been included in international group exhibitions at the Museum Van De Geest, NL; Columbus Museum of Art, OH; Jewish Museum, New York; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; GEM Museum of Contemporary Art, The Hague, the Netherlands ; Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Brazil; Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, Providence; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, AZ; Grimmuseum, Berlin, Germany; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Denmark; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; and the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany.

Work by Simon Evans™ is included in the permanent collections of major institutions worldwide, including the Berkeley Art Museum, CA; Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), Miami; Honolulu Museum of Art, HI; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (MUDAM), Luxembourg; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Museum of Art Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA. Simon Evans and Sarah Lannan currently live and work in Brooklyn, NY.

View Simon Evans™ CV

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