NYAB Event - Franklin Evans "2008/2009

Franklin Evans "2008/2009 < 2009/2010"

Sue Scott Gallery

This event has ended.

During the past year the studio’s evolution over time has become Franklin Evans' primary subject. He has created an experimental visual lab that celebrates the present over the past and upends the hierarchies of the studio. Tape, residue systems and process are elevated, and painting and the idea of finished artwork are demoted. He democratizes the studio components, such that a cluster of residual blocking tape and a watercolor can stand on equal footing. His materials include paint, tape, canvas, paper, watercolor, acrylic, wallboard, bubble wrap, art books, and exhibition press releases. He sets up systems that overlap, co-exist, and erase one another to arrive at new ways of thinking about and making work. The results allow for a presentation of materials in less familiar ways: unstretched canvases wrap walls and corners, extending from one room to the next; framing systems of strips of hand-painted tape cover areas of watercolors and drawings, obscuring the detail of the work on paper; the floor is treated as a plane for painting; brushstrokes painted on pieces of tape are reconfigured as mobile brushstrokes within the installation; press releases from 2008/2009 art season are assembled as an announcement and foundational framing for the 2009/2010 season. There is a visual abundance and near-psychedelic seriality that suggests the form of an artist’s notebook, where no material or thought is off limits. This abundance and deliberate impermanence undermine epistemological certainty, implicitly arguing that the complexity of relationships is constantly shifting and that knowledge is always in flux. In the installation, there are moments of resolution, but inevitably they dissolve as more visual information enters the field of vision. His work simultaneously suggests the not-quite-finished, the in-transition, the nearly-emerging, the slowly-evolving, the near-end, and the move-toward-erasure – all in a seemingly never-ending recombination.