NYAB Event - Emily Eveleth "New Paintings"

Emily Eveleth "New Paintings"

Danese Corey

This event has ended.

Over the years, Emily Eveleth has insistently pursued the ironic and expressive potential of her signature image, the ordinary and ubiquitous jelly doughnut. Alone or heaped, she locates the sublime in the creamy tones and resplendent brushstrokes of her sweet confections. The doughnuts function simultaneously as still life, landscape, portrait and anthropomorphized objects of “projected desire,” eroticism, and in many instances, explicit sexuality. 1Gesture and content engage the viewer, forming a covert exchange between doughnut and onlooker. There is neither uniformity in spatial relationships nor static emotional content in Eveleth’s new paintings. Rather, they contain a wealth of feeling—melancholy, the wry humor of recognition, the insecurity of darkness and the opposing innocence of paradisial light—which awakens the brushstroke and illuminates human experience.

The new paintings amplify and extend Eveleth’s technical achievements and formal concerns. While some works solidify existing ideas, others, such as Fragment, As Is and Unintended Consequences, generate added notions about subject matter, content and the act of painting itself. In a deconstructed state, the jelly hardens, the dough, drained of its moisture, splits and crumbles, and the shards of pastry assume the identity of artifact.

Emily Eveleth was born in Connecticut in 1960. She received an undergraduate degree from Smith College and pursued graduate studies at the Massachusetts College of Art. Her work is included in prominent museum, corporate and private collections. Among other awards, she was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Painting, and a French Government Grant for the Artist-in-Residency Program in Rochefort-en-Terre, and was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome. She currently lives and works in Massachusetts.

[Image: Emily Eveleth "Prop" (2012) oil on canvas, 30 x 35 in.]