I’ve always been drawn to artists who encourage a pause—who invite us to reconsider what we think we know, or how we think we know it. Simryn Gill is one of those artists. Her work resists speed. It asks for time. And it offers time in return.
When we presented Simryn’s exhibition Standing Still as part of the MATRIX Program at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, I was struck by how fully her work captured a feeling I’ve often struggled to name: the sensation of time suspended. The photographs in Standing Still depict buildings in Malaysia—homes, shopping centers, and grand development projects abandoned in the wake of the 1990s economic crash. Once promises of modernity, they now stand as quiet ruins. Simryn posed a simple but powerful question in making these images: Can photographs hold “that unsettling quality of a sort of hesitation in time, stilled time?” The result was a portrait of a region’s halted dreams, a vision of time skipping from future to past with no present in between.
That exhibition—and my experience working with Simryn—had a lasting effect on me. It was one of the moments that made me realize I wanted to be a museum director. Not just to organize shows, but to create spaces where conversations about impermanence, beauty, and personal values could unfold, slowly and meaningfully, for others.
An attunement to what lingers, to what’s left behind runs throughout Simryn’s work, which spans photography, sculpture, installation, and text. One of her pieces that lives with me is a strand of beads, each one rolled by hand from the pages of a book by Ralph Waldo Emerson. A gift from the artist to commemorate the birth of my son Emerson, the necklace rests on a bookshelf in my home. Each bead is a fragment of thought, language made physical, a tiny gesture of transformation. It’s tactile, intimate and profound. A strand of memory, philosophy, and care—all coiled into something subtly both beautiful and poignant.
“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
I believe in living with works that speak in different registers—some loud, some barely audible. My collection includes a range of artists and media, not to check a box, but to make space for the kinds of conversations that evolve over time. Simryn’s work reminds me that art doesn’t have to shout to be heard. It can simply be —present, thoughtful, and full of possibility.
Photographed by Shawn Chavez
