Evan Nesbit: "Ever Dissonant Futures"

March 1, 2018—April 21, 2018 | Reception Thursday, March 1, 2018

James Harris Gallery is pleased to present our second solo exhibition with California artist Evan Nesbit entitled “Ever Dissonant Futures.” The artist continues his investigation of the material support of the painted object, the substrate of painting, and its gestural deviations through process.  In Nesbit’s previous exhibition at the gallery, the artist’s primary focus was spatial abstraction where his burlap canvases were meticulously crafted through a process of dying, sewing and extrusion of acrylic paint pressed through the weave of the material. By dying the support structure and driving the pigment medium through it, the artist seamlessly integrated the medium with the support, creating an aesthetic teleology of flatness and pictorial organization.

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“Manifold Painting (Color Mold)” 2018
“Manifold Painting (Not a Pipe Etc.)” 2018
“Manifold Painting (Perishable Gestures)” 2018
“Manifold Painting (Social Vivisection)” 2018
“Manifold Painting (Resolute Jestures)” 2018
“Manifold Painting (Ritual Color chart 3)” 2018
“Manifold Painting (Intercontinental Office Blue)” 2018
“Manifold Painting (Manifold 3)” 2018
“Manifold Painting (All Tomorrows Futures)” 2018
“Manifold Painting (Pleasure Principles)” 2018

Evan Nesbit

Evan Nesbit's primary focus iss spatial abstraction where his burlap canvases were meticulously crafted through a process of dying, sewing and extrusion of acrylic paint pressed through the weave of the material. By dying the support structure and driving the pigment medium through it, the artist seamlessly integrated the medium with the support, creating an aesthetic teleology of flatness and pictorial organization. Nesbit continues his use of pushing pigment through the reverse side of the substrate, and now photographic images have been introduced by printing on a vinyl matrix. His markings compliment and disrupt the physical traces of reproduced photograph, trapping the image between the mechanical and the painted gesture. Nesbit’s new paintings allude to the inevitable commodification of the digital image but through his use of highly saturated color and neon tones of paint, the works situate themselves between the historical and contemporary painting antecedents in which artists incorporated found or mechanically produced images.

Evan Nesbit (b. 1985) lives and works in Grass Valley, CA. Nesbit received his BFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2009 and his MFA from Yale University in 2012. He has been awarded the Yale University Ely Harwood Schless Memorial Fund Prize for painting. Other recent solo exhibitions include: Van Doren Waxter, New York, Annarumma Gallery, Naples, Italy (2017); Koki Arts, Tokyo, Japan, Roberts and Tilton, Los Angeles, CA, 11R, New York, NY(2016. His work has additionally been included in numerous group exhibitions, such as: Sargent’s Daughter, New York NY (2017) 88 Projects Berlin, Germany Praz-Delavallade, Paris, France (2015).