Recent paintings by Emily Eveleth
March 29 - May 4, 2024
Opening Reception Friday, April 5th 5-8pm

We are pleased to announce In Silent Mode, an exhibition of recent figurative paintings by Emily Eveleth. This is Eveleth’s 9th solo exhibition with the gallery since 1994. Join us for an Opening Reception on Friday, April 5th between 5-8pm.

With this exhibition of oil paintings on mylar Emily Eveleth brings her ongoing series of figurative paintings to a new level. Each work features gloved hands communicating through silent, familiar gestures, creating images that are at once exhibitionist and introspective. Two pieces hanging parallel in the gallery deliberately place the viewer between contrasting moods. Meanwhile, a monumental 10 foot by 17 foot installation encourages viewers to encounter painting as a site-specific experience.

The gestures of these hands project a range of expressions: aggression, vulnerability, rage, tenderness, and the viewer is implicated in the creation of their meaning. By obscuring identity with gloves, employing well-known gestures, embedding art historical references and cultural clues, these paintings encourage looking beyond the immediacy of the expected.

In this exhibition we find for the first time a synthesis of Eveleth’s two main series, figurative paintings and paintings of doughnuts. Here she adds the lush, exuberant, culturally coded artifice of the doughnut paintings to the restraint, reduced color, self-absorption, and decorum found in the works in her last show with the gallery in 2018.

Despite their contrasting moods these works bring to the fore their connective tissue: that of reconsidering the ordinary as fraught with possibility. All use subject and point of view in ways that destabilize the notion of who is looking at whom, heightening the tension between the seer and the seen. The exposure of the sinister underpinning of the gestures and how they’ve embedded themselves in our collective memory is in fine balance with the inevitability of desire.