STUDIOS 3026 NEWSLETTER ARCHIVE

By Sam Spiegel

If you know Doni Silver Simons, you know two things: she is one of the warmest people in the room, and her mind is a complex web of time.

Doni works with hashmarks. Each one distinct, each one a record of presence in a specific interval. The accumulation of thousands of marks, none of them identical, builds into something documentary rather than decorative: a lifespan unfolding in real and irreversible time. She has described line as her first love, not in metaphor but in the truest sense, an intimacy that asked nothing of her but presence and gave back everything.

That love has guided her practice for decades. But right now, Doni is in a moment of flux.

"For decades I was exploring time as a continuum," she said. "And there's this very subtle shift I'm noticing that hasn't yet solidified. I'm shifting to time as a construct with edges."

For Doni, time has never been a simple straight line. For years she thought of it as an ascending spiral, each day lining up above all the previous ones — a structure in which every moment remained spiritually accessible across time. Which is why the word "edges" feels like such a departure. She is giving time the form and definition it never had before. And beneath that shift is a larger one: the move from collective existence to individual existence. Time not as something infinite and shared, but as something bound. Something that erodes.

"I'm looking at it eroding everywhere," she said.

When asked what brought this on, she counts the reasons without hesitation: moving her studio, the AI revolution, the political situation, her age, COVID, a lot of death, finishing a major body of work. Each body of work moves through phases. The initial ascension, intoxicating and all-consuming. Then a plateau that feels solid and good. Then the slow recognition of an end approaching, and the discomfort that comes with it.

"You could keep going," she says, "but you don't want to repeat yourself. You want to change your vocabulary."

When she needs to find her footing, she walks, reads, and returns to small informal drawings on paper; quick, clarifying marks made as she works through the confusion until her stability returns. She also keeps a small circle of artists close, not as influences so much as recognition. What draws her to Roman Opalka, to Rothko, and to the cave drawings at Lascaux is something they share across their vast differences: all three are documentary, all three carry an urgent respect for time, and all three speak to her on a very deep level. 

"I was here," she said. "It's a much bigger call, also."

What's next? More, she said. More of the same and more of new. She is learning the way she learned when young, and when the world becomes too complex to make sense in any other way, she does the only thing that has ever worked.

"If I want to understand the world, I have to make art. It is my way of calming the chaos."

Doni Silver Simons' work is on view at Studios 3026 as part of Under One Roof, and at the Braid, where her show has been extended through June. Check out her work on her website: https://donisilversimons.com/