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| timepaths - 3,000 sq ft, mixed media installation (solo exhibition), at Nevada Museum of Art (Reno, NV, 2013-2014)
In timepaths, I ask: How do I bring it all forward? All that survives? All that I can remember? How do I resurrect what is lost? timepaths embodies living as process – my life as an artist – and my artistic processes. The exhibition conflates my biography and my art in an enveloping, experiential installation in my birthplace – Reno, NV. The first eighteen years of my life were spent mostly in and around Reno. The next seven were in California and Iowa, for undergraduate and graduate school, respectively. The most recent twenty years have been in New York City. timepaths reconsiders the ideas of home and return, like the Homeric Odyssey, but taking into account the imaginary and constructed homelands of the displaced and the homeless. Process, and therefore time, drives the installation. Systems and questions are always open and unanswered. This world uses painting as one of its sources and explodes it into installation space as an immensely detailed, totalizing, sensorial environment, a collapse of art and life. The world of the studio confronts documentation of both art and biography and uses the documentation to extend itself through replication and distortion. Franklin Evans, as seen in this installation, is now visibly gayer, from the western United States, and of mixed Mexican heritage. I embrace the digital in my handmade art. I am cognizant of the limitations of the image and its fragmentary narrative as well as the power of accumulated images and the context in which they are presented to alter the meaning of the image. With digital storage capacity and image capture at levels that would have been unimaginable in my youth, I seize agency in representing myself – I am responsible for living as Franklin Evans and for telling Franklin’s story. I present a multidimensional library in an indexical age. My reflections range from a tender but not uncritical consideration of family, love, sex, death, class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, to art history and criticism – the peripheral information that surrounds the life of an artist. 2013soundthoughts Bibliography: Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Irwin, Sam Shepperd, Desert Gothic, David Wojnarowicz, Daniel Burren, Claire Bishop, Homer, Wallace Stegner, Salman Rushdie, Harold Pinter, Thomas Wolf, Wordsworth, V.S. Naipaul, Homi Bhabha Link to Brooklyn Rail Franklin Evans In Conversation with Greg Lindquist , 2013 |