The Bulletin Board: Simon Evans

Exhibition Description

The fourth installation for White Columns’ new project space The Bulletin Board – a 6’ x 4’ glazed aluminum bulletin board installed in our entrance lobby – is by Simon Evans. Evans’s project consists of dozens of the artist’s notebook drawings, which function as a kind of “index” to his ongoing concerns and preoccupations. A habitual compiler of lists, Evans seeks, through his self-consciously rough-edged art, to impose a semblance of order onto the chaos of his daily existence.

Born in South London in 1972, Evans arrived in San Francisco in 1994 as a professional skateboarder, though he would soon distance himself from the world of pro skating and turn his attention to making art. Self-taught in both vocations, Evans draws an analogy between the skater’s and artist’s daily negotiation of his immediate surroundings—an activity Evans identifies as “problem solving.” Evans acknowledges a debt to Paul Klee, whom he claims to admire principally for his titles. However, it’s not difficult to read in Evans’s work echoes of Klee’s scratchy, outsiderish mannerisms and also to detect a simultaneous desire on Evans’s part to follow Klee’s famous impulse to “take a line for a walk.” Simon Evans’s works take great pleasure in their self-immersed, ambulatory logic—a logic chock-full of neurotic detours and shortcuts and, inevitably, a few wrong turns and dead ends.
After a decade living in the Bay Area, Simon Evans (b. 1972) currently lives and works in London. His work has been shown at Adobe Books, San Francisco; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (where he won a 2004 SECA Award); and the Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco – where he currently has a solo exhibition. This December he will have his first survey exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado, followed by a solo exhibition at Zach Feuer Gallery (LFL), New York in 2006.

Simon Evans’ project for The Bulletin Board at White Columns was originally installed earlier this year on The Bulletin Board at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (www.wattis.org), a project initiated by Matthew Higgs for the Wattis Institute in 2003.