Simon Evans og Sarah Lannan: Humble  Junkatarians  Leaving  White  Frame 

For the exhibition, we have invited  the writer  William Pym, a friend  and collaborator of the duo, to write an introductory text about their practice.

‘’It is a rare thing to see a  mass  of  recent  works by Simon Evans and Sarah Lannan in one place. In their  nineteen y ears of collaborating, Evans and Lannan have not scaled or mechanized their process, and they have not worked with assistants. Their richly layered surfaces, unmistakeable fine graphic style and dense texts, some as complete as novels,  still  take months of  labor, by their own hands and thoughts, woven into the pair’s lives in Brooklyn.

Since it has been a while, it is worth revisiting the whole story. Evans was a teenage skateboard prodigy in London who took a fork in the road to San Francisco , where  he started making art with words, starting in sketchbooks.  It  was shown at  the scene spot Adobe Books, in San Francisco’s Mission District, where it  was  seen by gallerist eminence Jack Hanley, who started the ball rolling on the work’s display and recognition. This has been ongoing and worldwide for  the past two decades.

Evans came to prominence at a time when the  countercultural  forms of expression he’d grown up with—skateboarding, zines, music—were being radically commercialized and coopted  around him. The storied  Mission School,  for example,  a group of San Francisco Art Institute students whose language hybridizing graffiti, hobo art, historical grain and signage typology,  had made a real impact on  global  visual culture in the early 2000s. This impact was so great that its style, which is  to a certain degree  Evans’ style too, had by the mid-2000s been chomped on for capital  and mushed  into culture. This created an enormous challenge for the counterculture and punk  movements  of the time.  It  was tough,  say,  to reconcile the  honor  and intention of a  handstyle  with its  use as the typography in a Levi’s commercial.

But this is not a sad story, since it created the conditions under which Evans’ practice, soon in tandem with Lannan, could grow into the unique space  it  now  occupies.  In their words,  in  both slogans and flowing prose,  Evans and Lannan’s  express  a knowing cynicism that wrestles with all of culture,  digs in on what it means and what it all might be worth. They’re protecting it in a way, preserving their modes of doing things and the  purity of their  relationship the world  in  a time of knockoffs, simulation and soullessness. The artists  have  an innate fluency with Situationism and the  dérive, surrendering to the  mighty tide of  culture while mastering it with a panoramic view, as well as Marxism,  in their ability to dissect desire—to  both  enact and critique commodity fetishism at the same time. 

Sounds intense. And it  is intense, for such is the way of the world.  But here’s the thing: behind  its  politics and rhetorical  force,  the work of Evans and Lannan  is never polemical or depressed, because it is also beautiful, funny and clever. The instinct  and the weight  of the work  is  untouchable; the observations  land  clean  every time, because Evans and Lannan draw from life. A certain sympathetic  Impressionism, diaristic moments  grabbed in real time, are given  their  space.  Humor  is always accessed and enjoyed. And on top of everything, the work is  packed  with autobiography. It’s sometimes coded, flipped into wry therapy-speak, and it’s sometimes naked, as trusting and confessional as a letter, but it’s always there. The stories they tell are profound and  earned, while as economical as poetry.  And all of it this is delivered on  a chalky,  fresco-like surface, the  fine  faceted stone of accrued fragments and tape and  pressure, a buildup of hours and memories.  Graphically, the balance of image and text allows every message, every moment, its proper place.  As a result, the works glow. The awesome totality of  image, the totality of object,  created by the artists’ process,  is its final pleasure.

There is nothing like it. Please enjoy this message from America.’’

Short bio
Simon Evans and Sarah Lannan is the collaborative artistic project of Simon Evans (b. 1972, London, UK) and Sarah Lannan (b. 1984, Phoenix, USA). Based in Brooklyn, NY, the duo creates intricate, text-based collages that weave poetic phrases, diagrams, and visual elements drawn from everyday life. Evans and Lannan have exhibited extensively, with major solo shows at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland; and MUDAM, Luxembourg, among others. Their work has been featured in prestigious biennials such as the Istanbul and São Paulo Biennials and group exhibitions at leading institutions, including Tate Modern, SFMOMA, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Their art resides in important public collections, such as the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, USA; CIFO – Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami, USA; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; MUDAM – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg and the SFMoMA – San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, USA.

Kilde:
Galleri Bo Bjerggaard