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Artist information:
Evan Larson
Dearborn, MI
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Evan Larson is showing at:
UICA UICA
41 Sheldon Boulevard SE
Grand Rapids, MI 49503
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Evan Larson
Artist bio: Evan Larson received his Masters of Fine Arts from Cranbrook Academy of Art. He is an associate professor of art at Wayne State University. He has also been a professor at Rhode Island College and Southwest Texas State University. Larson received a William J. Fulbright Research Grant to study the relationship between national treasures (individual artists), industry and universities, which compose the culture of Korean metalsmithing.

Larson has exhibited his work both nationally and internationally including venues such as the National Ornamental Museum, The Museum of Arts & Crafts, Itami, Japan, Internationalen Handwerkmesse, Munich, Germany, San Francisco Craft & Folk Art Museum in California and the Cranbrook Art Museum. His newest instillation work was displayed at Spaces gallery’s Space lab experimental space.
Artist statement: In a time when our scientific, philosophic and general culture is returning to a model of data collection and analysis to find correlation and causation, the quest for meaning is increasingly being rediscovered in disparate-unrelated locations. This shift of understanding within our culture appears to move farther away from relying on theory driven models that fueled previous philosophic, scientific and art dialogs. My work substitutes pieces of various systems of knowledge to tell an otherwise inaccessible meaning. As an artist, I find myself becoming more acutely aware of our increasingly borderless reflexivity which is defined by micro cultures of interaction that are dependent on proximity and the permeability of these various borders. My new work examines how various cultures of interaction are physically catalyzed by extending the notion that like living communities and intellectual communities, artwork also has biospheres of interaction within itself, the institution and viewer.
About the work:
Title: Fallen Shadows

Art form: 3-D

Medium:

Year created: 2009

Description of work: Fallen Shadow consists of stretched-extruded plaster forms; as a type of animate appendages of the institutional wall. These aberrations have a feather form cut from the center which allows light to pass through them illuminating a feather on the shadowy wall. The field of falling feathers will culminate on the floor in a pile of physical metal quills. These feathers stand in as a contradiction of things that we know as rational to show an interplay between logics, imagination and interpretation. The work meditatively pares back all, but the essential information to focus on physicality merging with reason and further points to the sometimes-illogical conclusions that are part of perception and errors in interpolation. Fostering these moments of confusion create a breeding place for new forms of meaning. Through this non-cohesion a new fiction is born out of the former truth. This human coping mechanism is as critical to survival as it is comical in its distortions of reality.

Work statement: Through exploring prime forms of physical interaction, which are crafted to echo and distort sympathetic relationships between decorative arts traditions and those of the gallery-museum a blending of end logics can occur. In my work it is important to foster third party meanings between the tissue of ideas and the pre-linguistic language of objecthood. These active nodes are created through neutral and suppressed (direct) lines of logic as I try to dissolve the relationship between subject and object. The gallery wall is important to my work as an institutional stage that provides a reflexive space that is the seedbed for transformation. The installation work stretches the gallery wall to interact with decorative ornamentation, to physically demonstrate a type of tissue that connects ideas, space, material and social communities to each other. By presenting the public a paired back interpretation of realms of interconnection, I ask “Where does the gallery end and the work begin?”

Technical details:
Work width: 180 inches
Work height: 120 inches
Work depth: 24 inches
Required venue ceiling: n/a
Required venue door height: n/a
Required venue door width: n/a
Required wall linear footage: 15 ft.
Required venue square footage: n/a
Additional considerations:
Audio/video needed: No
Electrical needed: No
Lighting needed: Yes
Internet access needed: No
Ground floor access needed: No
Indoor space needed: Yes
Outdoor space needed: No

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