Eve Fowler “with it which it as it if it is to be”

Participant Inc.

poster for Eve Fowler “with it which it as it if it is to be”

This event has ended.

Eve Fowler has been working with text by Gertrude Stein to create an ongoing body of work that takes many forms. This exhibition is comprised of a neon sculpture and a new black and white 16mm film titled with it which it as it if it is to be.

Projected on video, the film was made over the past two years, during which time Fowler has been filming friends — female artists in their studios in New York and Los Angeles. Part intimate study, part feminist critique, the film is attentive to the working practices of artists unfolding before the camera in real time. The tasks they perform are not particularly remarkable, just whatever they happened to be doing that day. As the lens drifts affectionately over the hands, paint brushes, clay lumps, stacks and piles of studio detritus, we hear, off camera, their voices reading from Gertrude Stein’s “Many Many Women.” Stein’s words, spoken aloud, draw attention to the fact that language — like the practices and lives onscreen — is elastic and infinitely variable.

Having worked closely with all the appearing artists on exhibitions at Artist Curated Projects, Fowler’s apartment-based gallery in Los Angeles, these personal connections are manifested in the film — the intimacy of the gaze reflects that. A merging of Fowler’s work with Stein’s text and Artist Curated Projects, the film serves as a document of many relationships, professional, personal, and literary; and furthers her ongoing project to bring Stein’s writing forward. Fowler commented in an article by Michael Slenske for Cultured, “People know who (Stein) is as a cultural figure who helped Picasso and Matisse but even today people still don’t read her books.”

A review of Fowler’s recent exhibition, the difference is spreading, by Catherine Wagley for L.A. Weekly begins: “Crass ex-pat poet Gertrude Stein has always been known for her progressive associations: her mentorship of Hemingway, her support of Picasso and Matisse, her Paris salons. So it’s fitting that Eve Fowler, an L.A. artist who has been showing the work of other artists in her East Hollywood home and elsewhere for the past few years, would be drawn to Stein. But Fowler’s progressive community is less male and modernist, more fluid in its thinking about gender and power than Stein’s.”

This community has been Fowler’s focus since her earliest photographic works and collaborative projects. In a discussion with A.L. Steiner in North Drive Press #5, Fowler notes: “Something that’s important for me in my work is: We know some very powerful women. Amazing artists, very smart women, and powerful. That’s what I have been trying to get across in my pictures. I’m trying to make it visible, and through that visibility, show and give power to women.”

Eve Fowler lives and works in Los Angeles. A graduate of Temple University (BA, 1986), and Yale University (MFA, 1992), Fowler organizes Artist Curated Projects in Los Angeles. Fowler has had recent solo exhibitions at Fourteen30 Contemporary in Portland, OR and in Los Angeles at Mier Gallery and in Sydney Australia at ArtSpace in 2015. Her work was included in Sites of Reason: A Selection of Recent Acquisitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and in the Manifest Destiny billboard project, organized by LAND in 2014. She has had a solo shows at Horton Gallery, New York; Thomas Solomon Gallery, Los Angeles; and Julie Saul Gallery, New York. Fowler has had collaborative shows with Sam Gordon in the Bas Fisher Invitational in Miami, Feature, Inc., and Printed Matter in New York. Her book Anyone Telling Anything Is Telling That Thing was published by Printed Matter in September of 2013. Her second book, Hustlers, was published in May of 2014 by Capricious Publishing. Fowler’s work is included collections including The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, San Fransisco; The New Museum, New York and The Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.

Media

Schedule

from November 06, 2016 to December 18, 2016

Artist(s)

Eve Fowler

  • Facebook

    Reviews

    All content on this site is © their respective owner(s).
    New York Art Beat (2008) - About - Contact - Privacy - Terms of Use