Nancy Evans: Cosmic absorption

Contributed by Mary Jones / One of many pleasures in “Mashups,” Nancy Evans’s show at Sargent’s Daughters, is the sensation of immersive color. Eight abstract paintings, all 26 x 20 inches, reverberate softly with veils of translucent gradients and undulating organic form. The work is grounded in American Modernism, and a baseline of particular influences come to mind: Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keefe, Charles Burchfield, and, as a watercolorist, Helen Frankenthaler. But Evans finds her own domain through a mediated technical process that generates luminous depth. Since she is at heart a late-twentieth-century California artist, this comes with other specific associations. Her decades-long career in Los Angeles evolved during the Light and Space movement of the 1970s and coincides with the recently revived Desert Transcendentalists, notably Agnes Pelton. Embedded in the DNA of her paintings is the active perception of space, connected to consciousness and meditation. Like Stephen Mueller, Carrie Moyer, Betty Parsons, Mimi Lauter, and Bill Komoski, Evans mines psychic, even trippy, experiences, provocatively juxtaposing abstraction with symbolic form. Time travels from the ancient to the futuristic. 

The term “mashups” refers to the alchemical nature of her process, in both the material and metaphorical sense. She begins by overlaying and reworking images from two previous poured, silkscreened, and airbrushed canvases in Photoshop. When the slippages of alignment and color coalescence into something new, she does it a third time. These synthesized images are then printed twice on raw linen, the second printing being essential to delivering their powerfully saturated surfaces. The delicate gradations of light enhanced during the Photoshop stage of the process produces the sensation that the linen might be transparent, drawing the viewer in for an intimate look. The weave and texture of the linen remain evident. This textile materiality is disarming – unprecious and inviting, melding medium and surface. 

The colors, absorbed into the linen until the surface appears damp, move up and down the light spectrum from yellow to violet, from rainbow-like evanescence to deep-water opacity. Dominant throughout are aqueous blues and greens that host gossamer pinks, marsala reds, and aubergine purples. It’s a technicolor palette evocative of a remembered, offset natural world. Evans’s forms are portrayed in silhouette, acknowledging the flatness of the picture plane but reveling in spatial ambiguities from contour combinations. Some paintings offer recognizable hills, bells, caves, clouds, and leaves; others are completely abstract. Most compositions feature bifurcations, possible references to growth, reflection, or perhaps cellular division. Traces of the hand are subtle and improvisational; the paintings appear to have been breathed into being. After the printed linen is mounted on the stretcher panels, Evans’s final step is to heighten the color transitions, adding elements of drawing that clarify their mysterious hybridity.

Part of the show’s charm is its prompt to viewers to find the source images indicated in the titles. In MashUp_dome_snake, the dome in question is delicate rosy pink, unabashedly phallic. It is flanked, or held, within dark nightshades of blues and maroon. It imparts the illusion of being horizontally folded – ribboned – like heavy batter poured from a pan. The silhouette of a transparent leaf-green snake meanders and zigzags within the lingam shape of the dome. Blue forms behind the snake echo its pattern like an inverse shadow, or perhaps something a snake might hold within its coils. A horizontally bisecting purple tube, maybe a second snake, suggests the framework of above and below, in line with the Hindu concept of cosmic order. Evans has studied and referred to Hindu symbology in previous bodies of work, but here she keeps the intellectual and metaphorical aspects of her process lightly shimmering. 

MashUp_Orpheus_Waves is more abstract. In the background, vertical and blue green stripes flow downwards to intersect with a brown ground plane in a stage-like composition. A large, jagged diagonal opalescent white shape buoyantly flows from left to right, edge to edge. Sprays from the wave rise and remnants of a silkscreen passage from a parent painting are repurposed. The convergence of the digital and the painterly are most striking here, as is the shift from the ephemeral light from the computer screen to the tangible materials of paint and linen. The visual and coloristic references to water and light invite us into a pleasurable realm with slow, leisurely rhythms that harmonize the synthetic and the organic. Evans elevates color and intuition within a milieu of new technology, dialing down the cacophonic noise of turbulent times and privileging active imagination. Critic Klaus Kertiss once described Stephen Mueller’s work as “cosmic sponges.” The term applies equally to Evans’s aesthetically and referentially absorbent mashups.

“Nancy Evans: Mashups,” Sargent’s Daughters, 370 Broadway, New York, NY. Through March 29, 2025.

About the author: Mary Jones is an artist working in NYC.