As an extension of Julie Evans' current project (part of the exhibition Tending Toward the Untamed: Artists Respond to the Wild Garden), Wave Hill Director of Arts & Senior Curator Jennifer McGregor has worked with Evans to present a series of new work and a wall drawing in the Curatorial Reseach Lab. Evans' recent works are painted mylar constructions that address her ongoing interests in both process and perception. They combine the materiality and surface occupations of abstraction with the spatial illusions of figurative representation.
Using layered processes that move from the incidental to the intentional, Evans cuts out countless shapes from chance, gravitational accumulations of pooled color, and re-assemble them into unknowable mash-up forms that resemble animal, mineral and vegetable combined. While the cut pieces themselves are abstract and indistinct - they contain within them almost photographic references to parts of a whole, which allude to light, weight, and scale. Seamed together they become figurative and totemic - as body, as growth. They take on the tension of a strong familiarity that remains vague and elusive.
Pours and sprays create disembodied, brushless surfaces that play off the very hand-made qualities associated with the cutting, trimming and seaming together of parts, just as the details within play off the overall heft of their resulting singular, floating, presence.
Julie Evans is a visual artist from New York City, currently based in Hudson, NY. Her paintings and drawings have been exhibited extensively in both the US and abroad. Her most recent exhibition, Cowdust - a collaboration of works done in India with the traditional miniature painter Ajay Sharma - was shown at Julie Saul Gallery in Chelsea and was reviewed in both ARTFORUM and Art in America. Other recent exhibitions include group shows at Danese Gallery, Brattleboro Museum of Art, Lesley Heller Workspace, The Weatherspoon Art Museum, Daniel Weinberg Gallery, and McKenzie Fine Art. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, ARTFORUM, Art on Paper, Flash Art, Art In America, TimeOut New York, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship to India, as well as residency fellowships to MacDowell, Yaddo, Ucross, Millay, and Tamarind Institute. Her work is included in over 200 international public and private collections, including The Rubin Museum of Art, US Art in Embassies Program, Microsoft, Progressive Corporation, JP Morgan-Chase, and Pfizer Inc. An installation of Evans' new work is currently on view at Wave Hill's Glyndor Gallery in the Bronx.
Jennifer McGregor is the Director of Arts & Senior Curator at Wave Hill, 28-acre public garden and cultural center in the Bronx, presenting artworks in the galleries and on the grounds that engage the public in a dialogue with nature, culture and site. Tending Toward the Untamed: Artists Respond to the Wild Garden (which includes the work of Julie Evans) is on view from April 3 to August 19, 2012. She has worked with hundreds of artists from emerging to established to create new work and develop specific projects. As Director of the New York City Percent for Art Program from 1983-1990, she implemented the program guidelines and supervised sixty public art projects. In 1990, she founded McGregor Consulting to work nationally on public art commissions, exhibitions, and planning projects. With Renee Piechocki she recently developed a public art strategy for the Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston.
