Doni Silver Simons

Despite the systems we have devised to measure time, and thus give it the appearance of order and regularity, time remains relative to the circumstances in which we experience its passage. For more than three decades Doni Silver Simons has made marking time into a repetitive image-making ritual resulting in a prolific body of paintings that are a physical record of her life’s activity, and thus her existence. The marks are iconic - four vertical lines with a diagonal drawn through them - a familiar form of counting in blocks of five. And although the size and number of marks may vary from one series of canvases to another, the handwriting on the wall is as insistent as a heartbeat in its sustained effort to control temporal malleability and give it shape, form and consistency.

Ironically, the poetry in this work is in the way it succeeds in transcending the personal journey of the diarist-artist, evoking instead a timeless universal human impulse that stretches from ancient worlds to the modern, from a spiritual to a political context. One group of dark encrusted, stained surfaces, and scratched layered markings suggest the walls of a tomb, crypt, or dungeon, the presence of a prisoner in solitary confinement marking days to keep hold of reality, sanity. Our perception of time is subjective and elastic, and these images emanate the weight of interminable waiting, vacillating between willful activity and the inevitability of death. Other canvases suggest archaeological findings, preserved evidence of confinement, or merely calendars, records. A woman’s markings of her menstrual cycle? Or an inventory of goods stored? They hold the fascination of ruins with their resonances of the dead.

In contrast to these are ethereal abstract landscapes whose earthy colors, tonalities, and horizon lines evoke vast open spaces, windblown prairies on which the marks take the form of vertical slits, rips in the fabric of time, openings. Here the written lines are more like faint remnants of human passage washed over by time and the elements. Simons work invites us to contemplate our own relationship to time and the ways in which we inscribe our presence in the world.

Some of Doni’s work:

Words: Jacki Apple

Jacki Apple is a Los Angeles-based visual, performance, and media artist, designer, writer, composer, and producer whose work has been presented internationally. Her writings have been featured in numerous publications including THE magazine, The Drama Review, Art Journal, and High Performance. She is a professor at Art Center College of Design. Originally from New York, she was the first curator at Franklin Furnace in the 1970s.