“Franklin Evans: franklinsfootpaths" at the Figge Art Museum -- through September 26.
Through Sunday, September 26
Figge Art Museum, 225 West Second Street, Davenport IA
The talents of a gifted painter with two masters degrees from the University of Iowa will be showcased in the latest exhibition at the Figge Art Museum, with the Davenport venue, through September 26, housing the exhibition Franklin Evans: franklinsfootpaths, an installation that will explore elements of Evans' personal history in Iowa while also encouraging new ways of experiencing the Quad Cities museum.
Evans creates immersive environments that reflect his experience of blurred boundaries. His work mixes the personal and the historical, the chronological and the non-linear, the intuitive and the analytic, and the hand-made and the reproduction. For Franklinsfootpaths, Evans will use both the Figge's collection and the building's architecture to create a site-specific installation made up of painting, collage, sculpture, video, personal ephemera, and layers of artists' tape and other raw materials in the Gildehaus Gallery.
As the artist has stated, Franklin Evans wants viewers to walk all over his floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall installations. These immersive works are obliquely autobiographical, constructed from amassed art supplies and materials found in his studio space, including artists’ tape, bubble wrap, old newsprint, unstretched canvas, and press releases from gallery exhibitions. According to the artist, the purpose of his conceptual practice to “de-heroize” the artistic process and the artistic genius. Evans, who was trained as a painter even though he considers himself a materialist above all, uses paint to create hyper-realistic, illusionistic effects of layering and wear in these works. He thinks of his work as “the not-quite-finished, the in-transition, the nearly-emerging, the slowly-evolving, the near-end, and the move-towards-erasure.”
Born in Reno, Nevada, Evans has lived and worked in New York City since 1993, and has a BA degree from Stanford University, an MA and an MFA in Painting from the University of Iowa, and an MBA from Columbia University. He is also represented by New York's Miles McEnery Gallery, Boston's Steven Zevitas Gallery, and the FL Gallery in Milan, Italy, and Evans' work has been featured and reviewed in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Art in America, New York Magazine, Artforum, The New Yorker, and many other publications.
The exhibit itself will be on display through September 26, and regular museum hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Tuesdays through Saturdays (10 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Thursdays) and noon to 5 p.m. on Sundays. Museum admission is $4-10, and more information on Franklin Evans: franklinsfootpaths is available by calling (563)326-7804 and visiting FiggeArtMuseum.org.
