Artist Talk-Emily Eveleth

ARTIST TALK - Thursday, April 12, 6:30pm

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC LECTURE

Spanning the boundaries between portrait, landscape, and object of projected desire, Emily Eveleth’s paintings form a genre unto themselves. Her ongoing series of paintings of doughnuts invests this unlikely subject with unexpected presence and identity. “Eveleth's paintings restlessly shift across a spectrum of meanings, covering along the way all the distances between opposing significances; prosaic and profound, profane and sacred, banal and intriguing, to say nothing of the axis between cool asexuality and gushing, if veiled, sexuality.” *

In her concurrent series of figurative images lone figures stand in enigmatic isolation. Lost in private worlds the figures “seem to invite the viewer's gaze, acknowledge it, and then absorb it, folding it into their own particular dramas.” ** These figurative projections of doubt and uncertainty appear paradoxical to their central declarative placement and openness. The dramatic lighting’s interdependence on the rich enveloping darkness allows the figures to simultaneously emerge from and be enveloped by the inky space, projecting a quiet vulnerability.

Since the late 1980s, Eveleth has exhibited her paintings extensively in the United States, and her work is included in many permanent museum collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA, and Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA. The Smith College Museum of Art presented a solo show, a twelve-year survey of her paintings, in 2010 and acquired one of the paintings for its permanent collection. Her paintings have been featured in shows at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC, the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE, the Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY, and the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY, among others. Her work has been written about in Bomb Magazine, Art in America, the New Yorker and the New York Times. Awards include grants from the Art Matters Foundation, the New England Foundation for the Arts, and the French Government for the Artist-in-Residency Program in Rochefort-en-Terre. In 2002, she was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. 

*John Stomberg, Director of the Hood Museum, Dartmouth College
**Nico Israel, independent critic