NEW YORK, N.Y.- American artist Margaret Evangeline uses radically different yet complimentary media such as painting, video, and performance to make artworks that are as tactilely seductive as they are conceptually unsettling. In one signature body of work, the artist introduces bullet holes into otherwise pristine stainless steel surfaces, in an act of aesthetic contemplation that she describes as “the sensation of painting without the paint.” Evangeline’s subject matter comes from a wide range of sources: marginalized women, art history, American gun culture, the artist’s heritage, and her complex relationship to the various geographic sites of her unusual practice.
Evangeline’s mirror-like surfaces, sometimes part of large-scale site-specific installations in natural environments, seem both fragile and aggressive.
The artist’s primal battering of materials results in a surprisingly feminine voice attuned to simplicity at the service of complex social and psychic concerns. Primary sensations reverberate through Evangeline’s processes as her various works connect the dots of an unusually vivid autobiographical narrative. This tale, articulated through a singular yet multi-faceted vision that weaves ruination and renewal, is given its first comprehensive study in this book.
New York-based, Louisiana-born painter Margaret Evangeline has long experimented with aesthetically resistant material. Her primal batterings of form result in a surprisingly feminine voice, attuned to simplicity at the service of complex social and psychic concerns. Evangeline is perhaps best known for her use of gunshot and mirror polished stainless steel.
Recently she has begun a series of oil on canvas paintings, “Love Poems for Wet Paint”. These works complement her ongoing series of gunshot wounds in stainless steel panels which are, in the words of the artist, “haptic poetry…odes to the savage sensation of painting”.
In recent videos, she experiments with sound and actions collected while shooting the steel panels of a commissioned sculpture. Once Upon a Time, America, a three-minute video, was produced in conjunction with the site-specific installation now in the permanent collection of The Fields at ArtOmi, near Ghent, New York.
She is frequently written about in The New York Times, Art in America, ARTnews, The Chicago Tribune, Architectural Digest, among other publications.
Evangeline is the recipient of awards, including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, 2001, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, 1996. Solo exhibitions of the artist’s work have been held at venues as various as The Palm Beach ICA, The Delaware Center for the Arts, The Hafnarborg Art Museum outside Reykjavik, Iceland, and the Taipei Museum in Taiwan, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. She is a member of the NY Advisory Board for Louisiana ArtWorks.
In September 2008 Evangeline created a site-specific installation for the River Thames in London on a barge opposite the Tate Modern, commissioned by Illuminate Productions. The work, entitled Saved From Drowning, memorializes the tragic sinking of the pleasure boat, Marchioness, on a birthday voyage some thirty years ago.
She is represented by Stux Gallery in New York City and by Heriard-Cimino Gallery in New Orleans.
