Stux Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Anatomies of a Golden Calf featuring the new works of painter and multi-media artist Margaret Evangeline. This will be the artist’s fourth exhibition at the Stux Gallery. The exhibition will showcase a series of radiant, golden-yellow paintings on canvas. It will also include “JFK on Emergency Blanket” (2013) a digital print on an unfolded and creased solar blanket, as well as gold-plated stainless steel wall works shot through by the artist using a Taurus 454 Casull Revolver.
Evangeline’s paintings, with their ethereal golden tonalities, are covered over with crisscrossing, crackling, febrile marks that dynamically manipulate the overall surfaces. The results are undulating chords of space that strike the viewer simultaneously as sensuously intimate and monumental. In Anatomies of a Golden Calf the artist’s sequential marks invoke irradiated cloud curtains, sea waves, spider webs, rope bridges, tendrils and veins. In doing so the artist explores the dynamics of The Golden as intrinsically utopian. It recalls a memory of man’s prehistoric oneness with nature and thus, through its auratic presence, serves to prefigure a possible restoration of that condition. Evangeline’s exhibition creates a condition in the mind that recalls an ideal of perfection and power, an ideational El Dorado, an empire ephemeral yet permanent, perpetually newborn while petrified with age. Anatomies of a Golden Calf explores the extremist dynamics of gold as substance and metaphor. Evangeline delves into the fault lines of gold’s archetypal and allegorical character as they invoke falsity and truth, elevation and fall, appetite and idolatry, privilege and deprivation, fullness and paucity, purity and contamination. Just as artists James Lee Byars, Eric Orr, John Miller, and Not Vital among others have delved into the golden condition, Evangeline re-signifies the mythology of The Golden with an intention of creating a dynamic formalist un-structuring. Here, she re-directs the conversation that too often centers on the surface glare of gold. Her work conjures liminal conditions that linger between corruption and a state of grace. Margaret Evangeline’s Anatomies of a Golden Calf recall the unconditional purity of gold with the distance of ritual.