For years, if not decades, KAWS' iconic characters seemed to float in and out of pop-culture with a sort of omnipresent familiarity and yet not a folkloric backstory. They showed up on the street, in paintings, in sculptures and in vinyl toys so often that they permeated the contemporary art landscape in a way so very rare. Again, it was a character you almost had to say you knew because you knew you saw it. It wasn't until KAWS' brilliant exhibition of sculptures at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in England where the story started to coalesce for me: here was a larger-than-life representation of the things we leave behind; whether childhood, memories, family drama or even just the feeling of loneliness, sort of took on new life as these characters were, in a way, left behind in a large part in the north of England with a sense of stoic silence. And I thought maybe KAWS was talking to himself all these years, something about that lost childhood or youthful creativity, and the works changed for me. 

What makes TIME OFF fascinating is that what we saw years ago in Yorkshire, these large works left on their own in a large space with both a freedom and sort of quietness that surrounded them, KAWS has gone back to the bold colors that are his signature and yet his characters are now behind bars. It's as if they are pondering their own identity and place in the contemporary art world, both as an artist understanding the power of his own icon and what he may perceive as a limitation of it. And yet, they make the work feel more open and free because there is an honesty in that conversation. 

KAWS will always be the astute collector, an artist who helped reshape the contemporary art landscape and of the most wide-ranging, famed artists in the world. And TIME OFF shows there is an understanding with himself and the world he has created and what expectations come from that. As the gallery notes, "While doubt persists in these works, KAWS ultimately leaves his viewers with a palpable optimism for the future." And maybe that is, indeed, the conversation he is having with himself.  —Evan Pricco