Deanna Evans Projects Presents

A Collective Escape
January 16 - February 21, 2021
Opening Weekend Jan 16-17 12-8PM

Matilda Forsberg
Brittany Miller
Kevin O'Hara
Ricardo Partida
Ahna Serendren
Emma Steinkraus
Xiao Wang
Lauren Whearty

It is a pleasure to announce my inaugural exhibition, A Collective Escape, a group exhibition with Matilda Forsberg, Brittany Miller, Kevin O'Hara, Ricardo Partida, Ahna Serendren, Emma Steinkraus, Xiao Wang and Lauren Whearty. All artists were selected from a blind open call juried by Elizabeth Buhe, Alejandro Jassan and Nickola Pottinger.

Despite its many quarantines, delays and challenges, 2020 has found a way to bring us together through our collective need for escape, both mentally and physically. This unprecedented time has encouraged us to find different forms of joy in unexpected places. This group exhibition, A Collective Escape, maps out the journey from dream to liberation to destination.

Each work in this exhibition embodies different stages of escapism – through dreaming and fantasy, road trips and vacations, or finding new joy in the everyday, like creating a vegetable garden. All with the goal of uncovering simple ways to sink into your own space and mind at a time when you may not be able to physically depart.

Matilda Forsberg tells tales of family, identity, and heritage in her work. Originally from Sweden, her practice reflects on place, displacement, longing, and a search for new bonds. Laying the foundation for identity building, her paintings conflate her present experiences with narratives from the past by intermingling histories, memories, and feelings. While her work often originates from a deep personal connection to a place or an experience, the subjects are more universal, inspired by the complexities of cultural tradition carried forth by generations of families through rituals and shared experiences.

Brittany Miller paints scenes of vulnerable figures in her works, crouched and curled up in vague domestic spaces with expressions of listlessness and trepidation. Spinning cyclones and windswept landscapes press up against the windows, threatening the interiors. The bodies at rest fill the space – daydreaming and waiting for a storm that may or may not arrive.

Kevin O’Hara makes images that maintain an illusion of realism until inspected closely. The surface is deliberately inscrutable, prizing abstraction and mark making over detail as an intimate viewing experience. The eye catching depiction captures the viewer and draws them into a world of pure paint. The subject matter is a playground: chosen for symbolic meaning as well as a codified visual language that hosts an extremity of light and dark, soft and hard, saturation and texture.

Ricardo Partida has built a body of work that includes unconventional ideas of gender and sexuality as part of its value system. Partida creates power structures that dismantle and infiltrate Western ideas of gender and desire. In his practice, he paints saucy mythological avatars that embody power and desire. By combining neoclassical representations of Greek mythology and running it through a homoerotic filter, Partida creates fantasy surrogacies of seduction that include unconventional ideas of gender performance and sexuality as part of its value system.

Ahna Serendren builds up layers of oil paint and sand collected from beaches along the coast of California, where she grew up, in her paintings. Disorienting in perspective or scale, the spaces of these paintings are often difficult to place. Are they cellular or interstellar? Inside or outside the body? The shapes and forms found in these paintings could just as easily exist on the seashore or forest floor as inside the body, pointing toward our essential interconnectedness with the natural world.

Emma Steinkraus constructs saturated, fantastical paintings and installations that play with historical modes of representation to claim space for women and non-human nature. Her current project, Impossible Garden, reveals the contributions women artists made to natural history. This series layers paintings over a wallpaper installation that is collaged from depictions of flora and fauna made by women between the 16th and 19th centuries.

Xiao Wang is a figurative oil painter working with dramatic colors and thin glazes to render realistic landscapes and figures. His work meditates and reimagines the tradition of romanticism and the dynamics between landscape, power and expression. Wang examines the Romanticist views of nature and their ties to Enlightenment ideologies. In his paintings, depictions of nature are not a means to an end. He paints vegetation with distorted forms and colors, depicting plants as uncanny, sublime, and supernatural beings. Simultaneously, he portrays human figures with feelings of confusion and resignation, putting them at the mercy of the landscape.

Lauren Whearty investigates personal narratives through the shared cultural, and often domestic, lens of objects and scenes. These still life paintings set the stage for stories that are not fully told in a single image, and hint at more beyond the edge of the canvas. Lauren sees the practice of painting as an important form of active observation, which calls on us to consider the everyday in new and critical ways. 

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In the fall of 2020, artists were invited to apply for a blind open call for Deanna Evans Projects’ first exhibition in a new commercial space in January 2021. After years of exhibitions in pop-up spaces and Deanna’s apartment, we are excited to open our first commercial space and open up the opportunity to be a part of the inaugural exhibition, but with a twist. There are so many layers of bias that are involved in putting together an exhibition. By making this a blind open call, we are aiming to strip back some of the layers of prejudice including but not limited to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, experience, familiarity and/or notoriety. For this open call, there will be no CV, bio or details about the work included in the proposal, only 5 images. Our 3 guest jurors, Elizabeth Buhe, an art historian and critic, Alejandro Jassan, Associate Director of Press Relations at Lehmann Maupin, independent curator, writer and collector, and Nickola Pottinger, an artist and curator, will be presented with 5 images of each artist's work without any additional information. They will each be asked to pick their top 5, and from these 15 artists, Deanna Evans will curate her inaugural commercial space exhibition in January 2021. Not all 15 artists will be included, allowing for a more cohesive exhibition. It is an imperfect process, but attempts to dismantle the barriers to entry for artists by focusing solely on the work.