Cliff Evans Opening at Luxe Gallery, originally uploaded by Jon Cronin.

Cliff Evans – Empyrean
June 14th - July 26th, 2008

Luxe Gallery
53 Stanton street
New York, NY 10002

Opening Reception: Saturday June 14th, 2008. 7- 9pm.

“[T]he machine has passed into the heart of desire, that is, human activity constitutes nothing more than “residual work” or the machine’s psychic “imprint” on the individual’s imaginary world.” - Felix Guattari

For this exhibition, Evans presents two digital image-montage animations. Narratives, loops, and crescendos play across the landscape of a strangely frozen now. With the assumed position of a complicit virtual navigator, Evans traverses scenes of familiar power struggles, guiding the viewer through conflated contemporary and historical events and environments. Evans constructs these closed and flattened environments from found online images.

Traces of their own absence, these images are, again, sliced in time from their context, their lives, and re-appropriated to reform a world - view. Unsure of where to integrate his position, Evans repeats the scenes; just as the animated image - objects continue their dance – becoming machinic perceptions of a complicated sublimity.

Empyrean,

5 -Channel HD video projection. 6:30 loop. 3600 x 1280px.Form: Altar Piece and Billboard and MSNBC.
In the middle of some war-torn country, Brangelina rides a camel through the eye of the camera,
presenting gifts of the ob-scene, totem, and petrified to the “excluded.” The event is staged for the opening of Empyrean. Empyrean is a wellness retreat built upon the happily resting bones of the dispossessed.

The Dead Father and his Dother: Snake/Revival
2-Channel HD video object. 4:15 loop. 1600 x 1280px.
Form: Broad Sheet and Book and Screens in an Airport. The apocalypse is imagined as a portrait of a father crying for his dead father, laying bare the instance of power transfer manifest in weakness. The established sovereign is imagined through a “talkinghead” that stereotypes and conflates the father, the politician, the evangelist, the news anchor; (the speakers of law); and repeats them, telling tales of destruction and spectacle.

Cliff Evans was born on a commune in Darkwood, NSW, Australia in 1977. At the age of three he and his family moved to a peach orchard in East Texas. Evans graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts , Boston in 2002, returning a year later for the school’s competitive Fifth Year program. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, and is part-time visiting faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts .

www.cliffevans.net