Jason Evans
LEISURE COMFORT
Umwelt Monde
October 13th - 20th, daily 12-6pm
DOC, 26 rue du docteur Potain, 75019 Paris.
www.doc.work
Originally titled E-Z GO this catalogue for Yohji Yamamoto was art directed and designed by Peter Saville in 1992 who, in the nicest possible way, described my interventions as, “a fucking shambles, but prescient.” Of his original work he recalls, “I didn’t know what I was doing, your interpretation is as good as mine.”
It features photographs and video stills by Nina Schultz along side still lifes by Trevor Key as well as images by Norbert Schoerner and stock photography. Melanie Ward was the stylist on the project which, unusually for the time (though not for Yamamoto) featured mens’ and womens’ wear in the same context. It marked a timely departure from the studio elegance and technical experiments of Nick Knight’s previous catalogues with Marc Ascoli, an aesthetic temporarily eclipsed by the documentary style of ‘Grunge’ fashion photography.
The catalogue records an early appearance of the (currently ubiquitous) trainer in Fashion context, inspired by New York office workers wearing practical shoes with their formal work wear on their commutes.
Around this time I was on work-experience at i-D magazine, and with Knight, and the catalogue was something I retrieved from the end-of-year trash to use as a scrap book. The applied images were mostly from the news media, in particular the LA riots sparked by the Rodney King LAPD acquittals, which chimed with the injustice and institutional racism I was experiencing in Britain. I was an anxious young man.
Frustration is a consistent theme to my applications, some are erotic, some relate to the death of a close friend while others detail the kinds of photographs I wanted to make, in particular editorials by Mary Ellen Mark. My work is also represented, a 10x8 polaroid from my styling experiments with Craig McDean, video stills from a short fashion film I directed for Levi’s and off-prints from Brian Dowling’s BDI lab, where processing film was my main source of income at the time.
I felt my collaging was creating a parallel reality. I scrawled my own title on the cover of the catalogue like a graffiti tag, claiming this hybridized territory as my own. Like fashion, leisure and comfort were concepts I despised (and craved) in the belief that consumerism and convenience lead to ultimate doom.
- Jason Evans
Other participating spaces: The Community, Paris; Mercy Pictures, Auckland; Unsere Umwelt, Basel; Guimaraes, Vienna; Sydney, Sydney.
Organised by Thomas Jeppe.