The Curator's Eye

Transforming Visions | Evan Blackwell, Sculptor

selected by Marita Holdoway, owner, Benham Gallery

(Left) Life Cycle, 2007, 300 x 720 x 720 inches, latex, rubber, air pumps, ammo
boxes and timers. Photo by Marc Laurence. (Right) Life Cycle detail. Photo by Marina Fish.

I usually exhibit photographers, but Evan made me step out of my bounds. I first met him because he lives four floors directly above my gallery, with gallery manager Jason Hasenbank. The first time I saw what became his installation Life Cycle, I thought, “How ugly! What are these dead prophylactic things?” It was just a bunch of weather balloons sitting on his studio floor.

In the installation, the transformation was amazing. Pumps inflated, deflated and inflated them again rhythmically, so they appeared to breathe. They went from very synthetic to something organic and alive. As soon as I saw them, the child in me came out to play.

Evan takes objects that might be thought lifeless and repurposes them, using different forms of altering, repetition and patterning to transform them into powerful expressions of modern times. Where other people see a bunch of disposable plastic coat hangers, he sees a Möbius strip, or a DNA helix. Evan took thousands of toy soldiers and put them together into patterns. He studied how the strength of the form is built from the center out. He made the soldiers into a big mandala, a symbol of life made of tiny dark symbols of death. He made a rhythmical vessel of tiny riflemen, seemingly similar to Do Ho Suh’s work but executed in a completely different way. He turned sixty thousand translucent plastic straws into a five-foot-wide kaleidoscope in my gallery window; you could see passersby through the straws, incorporating their kinetic images into the piece.

Evan, a 2005 Betty Bowen Award finalist and 2008 UW ceramics MFA, taught ceramics at Pottery Northwest, and still makes perfectly beautiful, functional pottery. He is in a six-month residency at Pottery Workshop Shanghai. Evan’s art and imagination have motivated me to see things differently. Now I see the extraordinary in the simplest objects I encounter every day.

— Marita  Holdoway