MARGARET EVANGELINE

JONATHAN FERRARA GALLERY is proud to announce The Invisible Side of the Universe, an exhibition of New York City-based artist Margaret Evangeline. For her second solo show at the gallery, Evangeline debuts her latest suite of post-minimalist, oil paintings. The exhibition will be on view in the main gallery from 21 September through 29 October 2016 with a First Saturday Gallery Opening on 1 October from 6-9pm in conjunction with the annual Art for Arts’ Sake city-wide art openings.

The artist says of the exhibition . . . 

At this juncture these paintings of celadon fields with white wave-like patterns refer to gravity, or gravitational wave signatures. Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in 1916 in his general theory of relativity.  There is a Louisiana connection to all this. In a lab in Livingston Parish, one of two gravitational wave detectors, the sound of two black holes colliding, was heard for the first time early this year thus proving Einstein’s 75-year old theory.

This discovery inspired the series “The Invisible Side of the Universe”. My entire painting practice has been devoted to the vulnerabilities of the discovery process, of finding one’s way to significant content through maintaining a stance of openness to failure.  My question that led to the artworks was, if I knew what gravitational waves looked like, what would that be?

Seeing an artist’s conceptualized illustration of energy inside a black hole struck me as looking like a drawing of a Camellia from my mother’s garden.  It recalled to me an experience on the coldest day of the year when I picked all the buds from a Purple Dawn Camellia for a bouquet for my mother.  That experience felt important and I knew that it would inspire something some day when I was ready. My early interest in Camellias and my interest in coincidence guide me. We are built to understand the world through patterns of flukes and accidents.

Margaret Evangeline is a contemporary painter, sculptor, and installation artist who lives and works in New York City. She was the first female recipient of an MFA in Fine Arts from the University of New Orleans in 1978. She taught at Delgado Community College, where she pioneered the school’s first fine arts program. It was during this time that Evangeline’s interest in using unconventional and aesthetically resistant materials emerged in her painting, a technique that has come to define her formal practice. Evangeline began creating large-scale abstract oil paintings on canvas, layering crystallina, flocking, and other cultural detritus with her oil paints. Working during the Persian Gulf War, Evangeline created a body of paintings that were intended as a response to the political turmoil internationally at hand, and the social issues particular to the environment of New Orleans. These works were the first in a long line of paintings and sculpture that Evangeline created to reflect on the cultural climate of our times.

In 1992 Evangeline had her first show in New York City, that was well received and went on to garner a particularly insightful review by Eleanor Heartney in Art in America. This experience had a profound effect on Evangeline and ultimately led her to permanently relocate to New York, where she continues to live and work today.

It was upon settling in Manhattan that Evangeline was able to begin processing the impact of the south on her work, and experimenting with the way in which location affected her practice. Today, the experience of growing up in Louisiana has come to define her work as an artist. The long, circuitous history of Evangeline’s Acadian forebears, through the Hudson Bay down to Louisiana, forms a rich backdrop for her reflections upon and responses to current political questions, In 2002, during a residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute dedicated to supporting artists affected by 9/11, Evangeline began to further explore the act of shooting. Confronted by the vastness of the landscape and mired in the unanswerable questions left in the wake of the national tragedy, Evangeline began shooting holes in giant aluminum panels, engaging the landscape of the place through the absence she had created in the works, thereby finding a language to explore the collective loss the country was feeling.