It dispenses with hierarchies of importance, since they are constantly changing according to where you are and what you need. – Brian O’Doherty, Rauschenberg and the Vernacular Glance

As she always says of herself, she has a great deal of inertia and once started keeps going until she starts somewhere else. – Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Sue Scott Gallery is pleased to announce eyesontheedge, a mixed-media exhibition by Franklin Evans opening March 2, 2012 and running through April 15, 2012.

Evans examines the processes of making art — the generation of ideas and materials, their transformation from one to the other, and the many varied states in between. For this exhibition, he will present paintings, sculptures, photographs, and a sound piece in an all-encompassing environment. The wall paintings and collage environments of past installations, such as timecompressionmachine from Greater New York 2010 at MoMA PS1, have been collapsed by the artist and transferred to the surface of large-scale canvases. Mundane materials such as artist’s tape that previously played a key role as a barrier, frame, and drawing tool, are carefully recreated as trompe l’oeil representations, as the use of actual tape in the final compositions diminishes.

In the past, Evans has used gallery press releases to create a framing system presented as temporal floor sculpture. This practice has morphed into the usage of visual highlights from the artist’s gallery visits, captured online images, text highlights from books read over the past year, and scanned photographs from family albums. The viewer will discover various aspects of Evans, as an artist and a person: his childhood in Nevada, his mixed Mexican heritage, and his gay male identity. By focusing on the myriad visuals referencing the various aspects of Evans’ personae, some of these “peripheral” images remain on the periphery, while others become a focal point, as they do for indexicalmeasfocalscreen2012. The archive of hundreds of photographs is threaded to create an “image curtain” that divides the main gallery in two and which occupies an artistic space that builds on the Atlases of Aby Warburg and Gerhard Richter.

Entering this tandem exploration of periphery and focus, the viewer walks into the gallery over Evans’ sculptural “library”, an elevated floor and installation object in flux. It starts as a representation of the literal, moves to a residue of process, evolves as the ideas are extracted from the represented books, and settles into the sound piece 1967 in the main gallery room. 1967 consists of 350 fragments from his readings in the past year, ranging from Justin Spring’s biography of Samuel Steward, Secret Historian, to October Files’ Robert Rauschenberg. The text extractions are voiced by five performers and are played on random shuffle. Operating in the slippery non-linearity of memory, 1967 takes us back to Evans’ birth year.

Evans’ work has been exhibited in New York at MoMA PS1 (Greater New York 2010), El Museo del Barrio, The Drawing Center, Apexart, and in galleries in the U.S. and Europe. He co-curated Lush Life in 2010 with Omar Lopez-Chahoud at nine LES galleries and recently collaborated with Trajal Harrell on the visuals for Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (S), a performance at New York’s New Museum and The Kitchen, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA. Awards include a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and residencies at Yaddo and The Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program. Evans’ work is in the permanent collections of El Museo del Barrio, Weatherspoon Art Museum, The Pizzuti Collection, and Progressive Art Collection. This will be Evans’ second solo exhibition with the gallery.