Margaret Evangeline: An Injured Armory

About

The works in An Injured Armory propel Evangeline’s aesthetic into new realms by examining chromatic possibilities of a rich and smooth matte black finish and an iridescent white, applied to her usually bare stainless steel shot “canvasses”. The 5-sided black and white wall works have an unexpected physical interaction with the usual 4-sided canvases because of their sculpturally missing corner. These new shapes, along with the play of light and shadow in these coatings, create a look and feel that is familiar yet brutally alien.

The identities of these works are more particularized; their geometric presences are off-kilter and singularly prepossessing. Evangeline’s new series introduces a formal dialogue of displacement and mutation that pertains to a change of order from stasis to instability. In doing so, An Injured Armory reflects on conditions of growth, imbalance, variability, and unpredictability that have come to define the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Additionally, the artist will show several recent bullet-marked 24k gold-plated steel canvases. These artworks continue Margaret Evangeline’s decades-long exploration of injured armor as a power signifier. The artist applies a kind of reverse alchemy to gold so that the field of gold is transformed into a sacred object. The visible signs of a destructive battle are left to remind us that we can go beyond a flawed world of material existence to rise above ordinary human limits through mastery rather than perfection. Here the pure gold that once served as an indicator of excess becomes, in the 21st Century, a force for primal healing.

In a concurrent exhibition from March 13-August 2, 2015, the Louisiana State University Museum of Art in Baton Rouge, LA will present Margaret Evangeline: On War curated by Dr. Katie Pfohl, Curator - LSU Museum of Art.

One of the highlights of Margaret Evangeline: On War will be the premier of The Eternal Return, a panoramic 16 x 60 feet digital video presentation using LSU’s renowned planetarium projector. Made expressly for her exhibition Margaret Evangeline: On War,Evangeline’s video presentation The Eternal Return is inspired by the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and existentialist mystic Simone Weil, particularly her 1939 essay “The Iliad or The Poem of Force.” This LSU survey exhibition will provide an occasion for the public to reflect specifically on the nature and impact of war and more generally on the nature of destruction. Evangeline, a native of Baton Rouge, has an aesthetic that can be interpreted through various lenses – rebellion and protest or release and spectacle. Her powerful aesthetic will be presented by incorporating the artist’s provocative paintings, mixed media, and installation works from 1988-2015.

Margaret Evangeline holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans, 1978. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, 2001, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, 1996. Evangeline's work has received wide coverage in publications such as Art in America, The New York Times, The New York Post, The Chicago Tribune, Art Newspaper, and ArtNews. Her work has been exhibited in individual and group context at such prominent institutions as The Drawing Center, Art in General, Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Palm Beach ICA, the Hafnarborg, Reykjavik, Iceland, the The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at MSU, and the Taipei Museum in Taiwan.