Artist: Simon Evans
By Nicole Davis
With his piece titled “Everything I Have” (2008), Berlin-based (American born) artist Simon Evans offers up all the material contents of his life exposed and laid bare like a confession. He used inkjet photos Scotch taped directly to a 60 x 40 inch sheet of paper to visually catalog each material object he currently owns. He arranged them in rows like suspects in a lineup. There are 34 rows and 33 items in each row. That’s 1,122 items. Even at that number we know there are likely several objects unaccounted for and even if those missing items raised the total number to, say, 1,500 items, most of us secretly know we could top that number with the contents of our own lives.
Evans has admitted that he is not precious about his work. He is not afraid to use found and obsolete materials such as leaky pens, magazine clippings, white out and discarded pencil shavings. Through his work ethos he communicates a nonchalance, yet the final product echos a higher sense of meticulousness and planning. Perhaps it’s Evans’ background as a professional skateboarder that affords him this ability to be at once reckless and carefree yet focused enough to flawlessly and safely coast down a skate rail on two wheels.
Standing before “Everything I Have”, which hovers above you at over 6ft tall, you get an overwhelming sense of being enveloped by all that stuff. Yet, the fact that it can all be neatly framed and placed there on a gallery wall makes one also feel a sense of safety and detachment – like watching a lion nap peacefully in his cage.
The piece is part of a greater body of work which exhibited under the title “Island Time” – a reference to Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe and the life of the beloved shipwrecked castaway. Through “Everything I Have” the notion of survival and rationing is brought into the context of modern living. It raises the point that most of us actually believe we need all the stuff we own for survival.
If we imagined ourselves as castaways could we in turn cast a different eye on all our stuff? In light of this new perspective would we then prefer a kiwi or an emerald if offered a choice between both? An emerald is green and so is a kiwi, but the kiwi has a fuzzy skin you can touch, it has a sweet fragrance you can smell, it has a taste that tingles the tongue and above all it can feed you. It can actually sustain you. Somehow though, the emerald is currently priced at over 30,000 times the price of a kiwi.
Today is Thanksgiving. It is a day to take stock of all the things that we have. Evans created a cacophony of material objects through his piece, but Thanksgiving reminds us to also be thankful for the things that are metaphysical, irreplaceable, and organic – for the simple things that bring us the most wealth and nourishment.