Presentation & Performance
July 13, 2016, 7pm
Artists Space presents as it if it is to be, a commissioned neon by Los Angeles-based artist Eve Fowler that continues the artist's rearticulation of texts by Gertrude Stein into singular visual statements. This will be accompanied by a set of songs and improvisations by Brooklyn-based artist and musician Eve Essex, with projections created by Justin Q. Martin.
Presented within the context of the exhibition Pride Goes Before a Fall / Beware of a Holy Whore / Mise en Abyme, these artworks, both live and static, take as a starting point an inversion of light and lighting within representation. Neon lamps, synonymous with advertising and modernity, have been utilized in cinema at least since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), where they augment a futuristic, if chilling, portrayal of the modern cityscape. In contradistinction to the camera or the eye neon creates form by emitting rather than capturing light. Like a projector, it functions as both light source and image, moving between architecture and sculpture to frame—or at least intuit—a space for music and poetics.
NEON, in a further act of mirroring, references a program from the first iteration of Pride Goes Before a Fall:
NEONS
Calla Henkel, Max Pitegoff & Matthew Lutz-Kinoy
July 17, 2013
Eve Essex is a Brooklyn-based artist and musician, performing regularly as a solo artist and with collaboratives Das Audit and Essex Olivares. On woodwinds and electronics she has appeared at US Blues, Signal, Trans Pecos and Safe Gallery, NY, Harlekin/Mathew Gallery, Berlin, and the PUFFERSS Festival, Providence. As Das Audit, an instrumental ensemble with Craig Kalpakjian (guitar) and Sean Keenan (bass), recent New York appearances include SculptureCenter, Pioneer Works, Greene Naftali, and MoMA PS1 Printshop. They have self-released a full-length and live tape via Bandcamp. Since 2012 she has been part of the artist duo Essex Olivares with Juan Antonio Olivares; their performances and installations have been presented at Cell Project Space, London, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, and in New York at SculptureCenter, Lisa Cooley and Shoot the Lobster, among others, and as part of NY Fashion Week with Eckhaus Latta.
Eve Fowler (b. 1964) lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her MFA in photography from Yale University in 1992 and her BA in Journalism from Temple University in 1986. Recent solo exhibitions include as it if it is to be, Fourteen30 Contemporary (Portland, 2016), the difference is spreading, Mier Gallery (Los Angeles, 2015) and IT IS SO, IT IS SO, The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project (Houston, 2014). Recent group exhibitions include Sites of Reason: A Selection of Recent Acquisitions, MoMA (2014). Fowler’s work is in the collections of MoMA, New York; The New Museum, New York; SFMoMA, San Francisco; LACMA, Los Angeles, and The Smithsonian, Washington DC.
