Nancy Evans

Three fine solo shows of paintings offer personal perspectives as unique as the artists who created them: Laura Krifka, Evita Tezeno, and Nancy Evans. Tezeno’s work is a delightful, vibrant mixed-media swirl of collage and acrylic. “My Life, My Story” is reminiscent of a quilt, a layered narrative of family life in which the textured mediums also convey the stories. Krifka’s “Still Point,” is a beautiful tribute to light, the human body, and the human heart. With domestic settings framing lustrous images, her stunningly accomplished work pulls at the heart and reaches the soul. Nancy Evans focuses on a celestial landscape rather than a human one in “Moonshadow.” 

In Fleurs du mal, Evans moves from American Modernism to a post-apocalyptic version of American Regionalism, unsettling, ravishing and surreal.  Within its potent symbolism, many American myths collide.  Evans infuses Fleurs du mal with a poetic sense of ruin and devastation, but also with the possibility of renewal.  

Moonshadow brings together the artist’s series of Moon paintings, painted between 2014 and 2020, for the first time. In a departure from her abstract practice, and a long career that encompasses performance, sculpture, painting, drawing, and sound elements, Evans’ cosmic paintings take inspiration from the sublime forces of nature which the artist has experienced throughout the course of her life in California, from her upbringing in California’s expansive and fertile Central Valley, to the raw and rugged Pacific Ocean coastline, and the high desert landscapes of Joshua Tree and Yucca Valley.

Acclaimed for her original, independent vision, Evans combines a homespun sense of craft with a visionary’s quest for the cosmic. Making molds from found vegetation, Evans connects earthly decay to the Big Bang universe through rendered sculptures of Hindu symbols, lingams, kundalinis, and voids. They are at once sexual, ancient, and expressive forms.  The scope of the investigation has pushed Evans into a career that encompasses performance, sculpture, painting, drawing, and sound elements. 

Curated by Michael Duncan, her mysterious, sometimes brooding, sometimes triumphal work elegantly portrays archetypical images that transcend cultures and dwell in a gauzy, imaginative realm between faith and fairy tales. Evan’s first major solo project since 2012, the show is inspired both by her global travels and her spiritual travels through a variety of myths, rituals, and shared images.

Toward the back of the Jason Vass gallery, past nearly 40 other works on paper, canvas, fabric and resin by Los Angeles artist Nancy Evans, sits "Lion," a tabletop sculpture with enough dense energy to serve as an exclamation point to all the rest.