Margaret Evangeline

Time Bomb: New Paintings

January 5 - February 4, 2012

Time Bomb, 2011, oil on canvas, 108 x 72 in (274 x 183 cm)

Installation view

Ambuscade, 2011, Oil on canvas, 60 x 48 in (152 x 122 cm)

For My Next Trick, 2011, oil on canvas, 60 x 48 in (152 x 122 cm)

Installation view

Saint Sebastian 9, 2010, gunshot powder-coated stainless steel, 42 x 42 in (107 x 107 cm)

Rehabilitation of Evel Knieval, 2011, oil on canvas, 108 x 72 in (274 x 183 cm)

Installation view

Yes We Can If, 2011, oil on canvas, 72 x 108 in (183 x 274 cm)

Bridesmaid, 2010, gunshot powder-coated stainless steel, 46 x 46 in (117 x 117 cm)

Installation view

Diamonds In Your Mind, 2011, oil on canvas, 48 x 48 in (122 x 122 cm)

Fool for Love, 2011, oil on canvas, 48 x 48 in (122 x 122 cm)

Saint Sebastian 7, 2010, gunshot powder-coated stainless steel, 18 x 18 in (46 x 46 cm)

Saint Sebastian 10, 2010, gunshot powder-coated stainless steel, 18 x 18 in (46 x 46 cm)

Sleepless 10, 2010, oil on canvas, 60 x 72 in (152 x 183 cm)

Stux Gallery is pleased to present “Timebomb” - new oil paintings and bullet riddled stainless steel paintings by Margaret Evangeline. This will be the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition is introduced by the new Charta Artbooks publication, Margaret Evangeline, Shooting Through the Looking Glass. Stux Gallery is excited to announce the artist is having a concurrent exhibition of recent oil paintings and shotgun paintings entitled As-If at the Kim Foster Gallery to be held January 7 through February 4, 2012.

In “Timebomb” Evangeline continues her unique parallel painting practice that consists of exploring various time signatures left by gestural marks of paint on canvas and marks on stainless steel in the form of bullet holes. Evangeline’s current production shown at Stux Gallery extends the artist’s core visual and philosophical pursuits attending to experiences of temporality and of becoming.

The artist’s acerbic pictorial fields, with their linear striations, appear diagrammatic or schematic in some instances, suggestive of the outer contours of containers, or contraptions. In other cases the artist’s expressive lines intimate snarls of exposed wiring. “Timebomb”, demonstrates the artist’s involvement with word-play and mind play: the artist pictorially aims at detonating the denotative capacity of the signifier. Towards that end, mashups, substitutions, digressions, and the continual re- assignment of meaning are her first aesthetic priority.

Evangeline’s art practice is considered fundamentally as a process sensitive to its own transformation. A visual grammar of container forms whose quasi-machinic shapes are modeled using thin grid-like lines suggest wiring systems or schematics and generative color systems.

Simultaneously and alternately, through unexpected markmaking, the artist indicates the presence of accumulations bursting through slouchy networks and cage-like structures suggestive of regulatory systems. Evangeline introduces raw marks that remain distinct from a unifying network of elegantly sinuous structures, while doing so in a seemingly unrehearsed manner. The artist’s marks, unapologetically discordant and frenetic are often rendered in luminous color. Evangeline incorporates the scabrous and the lyrical into roguish structures that are metaphors for clogged labyrinthian thought and the cobwebby multiplicities of public discourse. Importantly, Margaret Evangeline’s great virtuosic mark-making shape-shifts within the same pictorial field creating unanticipated color shifts and tonalities. Zones of sensuality are introduced into conventional readings of interiority/exteriority that are hallmarks of her Timebomb paintings. Neutral or smoky colorations suggest impending post-apocalyptic conditions in which the vestigial assumes primary status.