"Not Exactly a Mountain" Exhibition
The Proposition
This event has ended.
The Proposition presents "Not Exactly a Mountain," a two-person exhibition in the Main Gallery featuring new paintings by Mike Park, in addition to new watercolors by Tim Evans (some of which are also featured in Blacklight Burner, now playing in the Project Room). The often whimsical and densely meandering narrative work of Mike Park is driven by his experiences living and working in the remote industrial sprawl of east Oakland, California. Anti-heroic, metonymically charged, and often sexually ambiguous, Park’s polymer coated acrylic paintings on wood are a pointed yet playful counter-attack on socially prescribed notions of narrative and sexual inhibition. At times dark
and menacing, but always oddly uplifting, the power of Park’s work lies in its ability to oscillate between the industrial warble of his immediate surroundings and the inner reaches of his imagination, where desire, loss and self-deprecation meld into an orgiastic mélange of androgynous allure. Tim Evans works on paper are playful distortions of the figural tradition, containing disarmingly pornographic nudes patched together from disparate sources including internet porn-sites, Japanese manga and anime, and the artist's own transformative imagination. Done in watercolor, these paintings collapse representative space and realistic rendering; they are at once familiar and disorienting, contrasting graphic precision against the fluidity of the medium as nascent narratives struggle against iconographic implosion. Unabashedly taking manga and anime as a stylistic point of reference, Tim Evans’ artworks connect to a tradition of visual storytelling that allow for greater personal
and transgressive freedom without directly transcribing that tradition's most superficial characteristics. Instead, the artist strips loaded imagery of meaning,deliberately mistranslating coded contexts into a lyrical point of no return.