Give me shelter, keep me safe, says local artist

When Daniel Evans was eight, his Opa built him what he called a treehouse, even though it never sat in a tree. The shack on the ground appeased the young artist, giving him refuge to be with his thoughts.

That private, safe place must have meant a lot to him. He kept all of the pieces and has now rebuilt it as homage to his Opa … and to the notion of refuge itself.

The structure, now hanging from the gallery ceiling by string, is the prominent feature of Sanctuary, Evans’ show at Latitude 53. Sure, there are several finely drawn pencil sketches that line the walls but your focus should be on the decrepit slats of wood that dangle like melancholy ghosts.

The idea struck Evans when he took it apart and felt how much it really meant to him.

“That was such a visceral experience to me. That’s not a way that I’ve ever worked before, to just be really affected by something and then be compelled to make a work without understanding why I’m doing it. That was a turning point for me.”

He later thought of how his Opa was traumatized during his own youth but never had his own ‘safe place’ to deal with the psychological aftermath. The man was raised in the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation. Later, he participated in the War of Independence in Indonesia, what Evans describes as “a protracted and bloody conflict bound up in morally ambiguous colonial politics.”

At the same age that Evans was taking down his childhood haven, his Opa was leaving the battlefield behind but was never fully able to shake the war. He didn’t feel safe to deal with the trauma and couldn’t talk to his family about it, so his mind created a safe place.

“It very much impacted who he was as an individual. The way that he dealt with his experiences … was just to seal that part of his life off. It allowed him to carry on but there’s a certain sense that that’s like amputating and there’s a part of you that’s missing.”

This might be the most obvious case of art as therapy but it likely won’t even be seen by the one person that it’s intended for.

“I feel like I’m invading his privacy in a way but, at the same time, what I think I was trying to do was reach out to him.”

This is a very personal departure from Evans’ mostly academic body of work and graphic novels. This idea of how safety can affect healing and personal growth will come up during his artist’s talk at the gallery next Thursday at 7 p.m.