MEMBER SPOTLIGHT
October 3, 2022
This week we recognize Eliza Evans Eliza Evans, and her work focused on climate and resource extraction.
Evans' current and ongoing project, All the Way to Hell (above), which began in 2020,is an activist art model for disrupting fossil fuel development on private land in the U.S.The monumental work, currently with over 7,000 participants, converts hundreds of individual gestures into a new form of environmental resistance at the intersection of property law, fossil fuel business practice, and bureaucracy. The project transfers rights from single mineral properties to hundreds of people to impeded fossil fuel development. Evans will attempt to file the first deeds in Oklahoma this month. (click images for more information)
Time Machine (2019-ongoing, above) is a durational and interactive work in which the artist spent 8-hours inside a mass-produced greenhouse. The outside and inside temperature difference served as a kind of climate change scenario generator. As the temperature rose during the day it was amplified inside the greenhouse with attendant stress on her body. The following day the artist invited visitors inside the Time Machine to experience a possible future.
The Compact (above) is three seven-foot tall cast concrete figures that enlist Cycladic, Greek, and 3D-scanned female forms to examine the compression of individual agency over millennia and our more contemporary assent to the myriad ways we are surveilled, measured, and archived. The figure is made from clearly defined parts loosely held by two threaded rods and patches of mortar. The rebar matrixes that reinforce the concrete reference the inscription of gridded systems on our bodies and our actions.
Pause (2018, above) is three 10-foot squares plots surrounded by an 8 to 9-foot tall fence made of t-posts and tinted monofilament. The installation is an unambiguous artwork inscribed in the forest that by its shape and materials alludes to science, gardening, cultivation, and management. There is no gate or passageway into the plots. The viewer is excluded from the plot’s interior but for a 12-18-inch gap between the forest floor and the bottom of the fencing. The viewer is left to consider what is protected and why. Inside the plots, the forest will be for the most part unmolested by both deer and humans for the duration of the work.
Below is a well core sample and quitclaim mineral deed representing Evan's All the Way to Hell project in a gallery setting.
Eliza Evans experiments with sculpture, print, video, and digital media to identify disconnections and absurdities in social, economic, and ecological systems. Her work has been exhibited at the Bronx Museum (2021), Missoula Art Museum (2021), Austin Peay State University, Clarksville TN (2021), Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, NY (2020), Alexey von Schlippe Gallery, University of Connecticut (2020), Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua, NY (2019), Edward Hopper House Museum, Nyack, NY (2019), and BRIC, Brooklyn (2017), and has appeared in the New York Times, Art in America, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, and Dissent Magazine. A law review article on her work is forthcoming in the Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal. Residencies include the LMCC Art Center (2022), the Art Law Program (2021), National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, UC Santa Barbara (2020), and Bronx Museum AIM. She is currently a member of NEW INC, the New Museum’s cultural incubator. Evans was born in a Rust Belt steel town and raised in rural Appalachia. She currently splits her time between Tennessee and New York.
Featured Images (top to bottom): ©Eliza Evans, All the Way to Hell, 2020-ongoing; Time Machine, 2019-ongoing; The Compact, 2019, concrete, steel; Pause, 2018, posts, monofilament; All the Way to Hell, 2020-ongoing; below is portrait of the artist.
