A Joy Ride for Dogs

by Sasha Helinski

A poetic appreciation for the everyday links John Evans and John O’Connor together. In particular, I am struck by their mutual interest in reconsidering the mundane. For Evans, this is the habitual attention to the discarded, lost, or ignored. Everyday, Evans collected “found objects'' o the street in his daily comings and goings. Whether clever, quaint reminders from the post o ce (''Mail early in the day” or “use zip code” in March 11, 1976), a label from an Italian beer bottle (March 31, 1982), a suggestive, cheeky ad for a photo studio (December 14, 1977), photos of an orange cat (June 18, 1975), or a gra tied sticker (July 8, 1989), each item was adopted and given a new life in a collage of sandcastle-like assemblages of bygones, often flanked by birds, perhaps on their own walks to make their own collages. In a sense, each artwork is a multi-generational object.

O’Connor on the other hand, is a collector of questions and answers, memories, and ruminations. I look at these paintings and drawings as earnest odes to our obsessive curiosities. The subjects themselves are pulled from O’Connor’s everyday life: the memory of an old boss who was a lottery-hobbyist, , his 9-year-old son’s math homework, blood pressure recordings, news headlines (which are at best wacky and at worst frightening), or even the universal experience of wondering what the time is.

O’Connor digs deeply into each topic, almost like an anthropologist, investigating, considering and reconsidering why something is the way that it is. In doing so, a prosaic, everyday subject such as buying a new car becomes a sincere and thoughtful puzzle-like portrait.

Both artists are incredibly generous in sharing themselves in their artwork. Evans o ers us his eye. His daily collages function as diary entries. We are invited to join him in recalling his day, appreciating the ephemera that caught his eye, relics he has collected and choreographed. We get to be the birds walking alongside him.

O’Connor gives us a peephole into his mind. We see him working through his hypotheses and musings, cataloging his attempts at guessing the correct time or questioning the power of conspiracies through mathematics and pattern-making. In Lucky Number, crossed out words show us the man behind the curtain, the artist working out his own conclusions on the surface of the painting itself.

Like a layered cake, between the sincerity and earnestness of each artist’s practice is a jammy filling of humor and playfulness. O’Connor looks out for the absurdities in life and our own funny fallacies, whether that’s wasting your entire income to make enough money to cover the di erence between said income and the cost of a new corvettealmost a sad, single person’s version of Gift of the Magi, or the whole concept of the “weight loss industry.” Through his self-imposed rules to organize his findings, thoughts, and recordings, O’Connor’s drawings and paintings become almost gameboard-like. Jumbled, brightly colored, interlocking geometric shapes, growing together, sprawling across the page, meandering or zippy at times, taking the viewer’s hand and pulling us through its workings. Often coupled with playful, cartoonish lettering, there is an undeniable “fun” quality to the work. At the same time, visually, they remarkably capture the experience of deep contemplation: an organic, sometimes tangled, organization attempting to straighten oneself out by digging deeper.

In Evans’ collages, wit and levity reign. A wrapper for a Black Panther Whistling Bottle Rocket sits atop a ripped school photo like a hat, under a billboard-like, literal “Debris” sticker, and alongside the ironic “In case of defect, return this slip with garment.” They are winking at us. We hope the garment is not defective, as the inspection slip has started a new life on and in July 9, 1989 Meanwhile, the seagulls in the back are minding their own business. It’s a dance of misfits.

When considering the two Johns, I try to guess what their conversation might’ve been like had they ever met. They share an appreciation for the everyday, both the utterly banal or completely odd, and taking the time to dig in and lean fully into that interest - like a joy ride for dogs. A di erent way of looking, listening, discerning, and ultimately enjoying. I like to think of them reading absurd headlines together and reaching far back into their brains for anecdotes. I read a headline not too long ago about a chicken roaming around Central

Park watching dogs. A few weeks later, I stumbled across the follow-up story about the wayward chicken and his rescue and deployment to a “chicken sanctuary.” Perhaps another old boss of John’s had a chicken or maybe John himself had once wondered about the miscellaneous, unescorted animals roaming around Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Perhaps John had once come across a traveling chicken of his own while on a hunt for his daily collage and used a feather in a September collage. It’s fun to imagine.

Sasha Helinski, February 2023