Simon Evans & Sarah Lannan: Never Better Than Later

Rebecca Camacho Presents is pleased to announce Never Better Than Later, a solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist duo Simon Evans & Sarah Lannan.

Simon Evans’ self-taught artistic practice began in San Francisco in the late 1990’s. Arriving in the city in 1994 as a professional skateboarder, Evans soon shifted his time and attention from sport to writing short stories and poetry. This deep preoccupation with language, narratives, and the internal rhythm of words became the foundation for his visual art practice. As texts expanded into zines and then artworks, Evans debuted his first public exhibition in 2002 at the legendary Adobe Books Backroom Gallery. Creating dense mixed media, text-based collages saturated with short, poetic phrases, drawings, and images often created from the detritus of everyday life both inside and outside of the studio, larger national and international recognition quickly followed, including the SFMOMA SECA Art Award in 2004.

A couple since 2006, Evans and Lannan left San Francisco for Berlin shortly after meeting. Lannan, also a self-taught artist working mainly as a commercial illustrator, and Evans began collaborating closely on highly detailed, labor-intensive work, and the pair soon integrated their practices.

Exhibiting in the city for the first time in over two decades, Evans and Lannan’s Never Better Than Later is a love letter to San Francisco, the place where both their creative and personal histories began.

A practice based in language and the organization of thoughts, Evans and Lannan’s work explores themes of irony and earnestness, presenting emotional landscapes through charts, maps, and inventories that chronicle their own lived experiences and document the larger highs and lows of their time. Typically constructed on paper using layered tape, paint, white-out, and pen, works are physically built up in overlapping strata, with materials repeatedly adhered to one another to create complex, tactile and terrestrial surfaces.

In Mexican Blanket Diaries, the duo mirrors a traditional, rectangular woven serape blanket featuring bold, multi-colored horizontal stripes. The stripes are comprised of just legible lines of hand-written text narrating quotidian events, akin to journal entries, throughout this past year as the pair spent months at a time in Mexico City, Copenhagen and their Brooklyn home.

In dialogue, two works titled Mistakes 1 and Mistakes 2 feature swirling combinations of colors and phrases, with all the words scratched out or written over. Documenting the personal evolution from when they last lived in San Francisco to now, the pieces revisit the goals Evans and Lannan once set for themselves and contrast them with what has actually been achieved. Both cynical and humorous, the works map the constant pivoting and reshuffling of life, while continuing to flow and move forward.

Hearts, the literal and figurative central beat of the exhibition, details hundreds of small, handmade heart decals with associated descriptions: ‘I recognize love it forms like a weather pattern,’ ‘So many cities in every city,’ ‘See Adam Driver on an Ebike but it isn’t him,’ ‘This would make a great photo if you had a good camera. Tourists betray their hearts,’ ‘Dear San Francisco. I can’t believe they call you a woman. You must remind certain men of ships. I think of you often.’

Simon Evans and Sarah Lannan’s Never Better Than Later holds storytelling at its core. A collection of new works on paper and three objects, Evans and Lannan’s regimented mapping of the joys and sorrows, anxieties and serenities of contemporary existence is both wry and tender. Detailing subjective, psychological and emotional landscapes, like accomplished cartographers, Evans and Lannan orient us to the surrounding world and show us where we are.

Simon Evans and Sarah Lannan have 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). Evans and Lannan were 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 and Sarah Lannan 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.