As a Marie Walsh Sharpe residency recipient during the past year, New York-based artist Franklin Evans used the studio as his primary subject. Evans continues this exploration in a site-responsive installation titled “2008/2009 < 2009/2010.” Evans creates an experimental visual lab that upends the hierarchies of the studio. Tape is elevated, and painting is demoted, democratizing the studio components, such that a cluster of residual blocking tape and a watercolor can stand on equal footing. The wide array of materials used includes: watercolor, wallboard, paper, tape, bubble wrap, thread, press releases, and art essays. 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.

Franklin Evans was born in 1967 in Reno, Nevada. He received his BA from Stanford University and his MFA from The University of Iowa. He lives and works in New York City. His work has been exhibited at The Drawing Center, New York, NY; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; and El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY. He has had solo or two-person exhibitions in New York, Toronto, San Francisco, Milan, and Zurich. In October, he will produce the set design for “Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at The Judson Church (S)” a collaboration with choreographer Trajal Harrell at The New Museum. He has been the recipient of The LMCC Workspace Residency (2004), The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Space Program (2008/2009), and Yaddo (2009). His work is in the permanent collections of The Weatherspoon Art Museum; The Sweeney Art Gallery, University of California, Riverside; El Museo del Barrio; and Progression Art Collection.