Location: Bolinas, CA
Medium: Photography, Film, Social practice
Website: perryshimon.com
Perry Shimon is an artist and writer based in West Marin, on the Northern California coast, whose practice moves between photography, moving image, writing and long-form archival collaboration. He describes himself as an artist interested in more-than-human collaboration, sharing and kindness, and much of his output takes the form of open, provisional archives rather than discrete objects. Through the 2010s he worked primarily as a photographer, building collections of street and documentary images made across the United States in the lineage of Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand, alongside a run of photo essays attentive to subcultures and particular events.
Shimon earned a Masters in Art & Ecology from Goldsmiths, University of London, showing in the programme’s degree exhibition in 2022 as part of its inaugural cohort. His thesis addressed biennialization and hyperculture, arguing for the decolonization of time, the dissolution of borders, a reimagining of socioecological space and the flourishing of more-than-human dignity. The research period produced ritualsintime.space, a sprawling web archive that he has left deliberately unedited — by his own accounting tens of thousands of words, thousands of images, dozens of loops and films, open letters, field recordings and a libretto.
He has worked for more than a decade with the Bolinas photographer Ilka Hartmann on her archive, concentrating on the distinctive history of the West Marin community the two share, and preserving negatives that had never been printed. He is the founder of the Museum of Quotidian Kindness & Beauty, an itinerant institute that exhibits anonymous, discarded images and objects collected for their contingent poetry, and a co-initiator of Tributaries, a roving group happening that first convened in 2018. His current long-term project is Sweetness & Power, a film on sugar and plantation agriculture.
Shimon’s work is built out of accumulation and correspondence. He shoots constantly — much of the moving-image work is made on an iPhone — and then assembles the results into essayistic sequences that braid image, voice, quotation and diary. Films such as Ruins, Keith and Deconstructing the Western Passionfruit Narrative run from a few minutes to nearly two hours, and read less as finished statements than as thinking conducted in public. Reading is part of the material: projects depart from David Joselit, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Byung-Chul Han, Heraclitus, and the writers of the Anthropocene, and the resulting essays, plays, playlists and open letters are presented alongside the images rather than behind them.
The recurring subject is time — biennial time, ecological time, the time of a life measured against institutions — and the recurring tone is one of deliberate friendliness. Where much research-based art adopts the register of the dossier, Shimon’s leans toward generosity, ludic framing and quotidian attention: a flea market, a swept aisle in a dollar store, a vernacular snapshot bought secondhand. That ethic also shapes how the work is distributed, through Instagram feeds, unlisted web archives, Etsy storefronts and shared PDFs as readily as through galleries.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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