Stacey Evans – C-VILLE Weekly

Passing glances: Stacey Evans explores light perspectives in ‘This Familiar Space’

One of the first assignments Stacey Evans gives her photography class is to visit the same place at different times throughout the day, a few days in a row. She tasks her PVCC students with noticing the light, how it’s different minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day. If Monday’s morning light is soft, Tuesday’s might be bright, and Wednesday’s might be grayed by rain.

It’s a practical lesson for an art that relies on light not just for composition but for mood, for atmosphere, for meaning. It’s also a rather practical (and sometimes difficult) lesson for life: Change is constant.

Change is also a major theme in Evans’ own photography. She ruminated on it in “Ways of Seeing,” a series of collages from photos shot through train car windows and exhibited at Second Street Gallery in April 2017. It’s present again in Evans’ current SSG exhibition, “This Familiar Space/Cet Espace Familier,” which opened online last week.

“‘This Familiar Space’ is two years in the making, and the dozens of works that comprise the show were made by artists here in Charlottesville and in Besançon, France, one of Charlottesville’s sister cities.

Evans served as artist, producer, and curator for the show, which is divided into four unique, but related, groups of works. Evans planned to mount it on the walls of SSG’s Dové Gallery, until the space closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and she had to envision and execute it for the web.

One of the photos in the “Daily Muse” series. Photo by Stacey Evans

The first segment, “Daily Muse,” is a series of 11 photographs of the same rooftop view in Besançon, taken by Evans on a 2018 Sister Cities Commission trip. Capturing this view from her hotel room became a routine for Evans on the trip, and though the visual perspective is technically the same, none of the photos are. The sky differs, sometimes drastically and sometimes subtly, from image to image, affecting the colors of the building below, the shadows, and the overall tone of the photographs. In the bottom center space of the grid, Evans has written, “This too shall pass,” putting to words what the eyes and the mind have already acknowledged, consciously or not.

Evans expects the text might resonate deeply with viewers right now, as we’re all eager for the pandemic to pass. But, she says, we’re not always so open to change: We like our routines, too. And the set of photographs presented in “Daily Muse” shows how routine and change are not necessarily opposite, but complementary, co-existent. It’s about “understanding that things aren’t permanent. Change does happen, and [you have to be] okay with change, because if you get stuck in your ways, I don’t see that as a good thing,” either.

Another image from “Daily Muse.” Photo by Stacey Evans

Evans’ role shifts a bit in “Look to See.” She made photographs in both Charlottesville and Besançon, and students altered them into collages. She had Charlottesville High School students start a batch, then brought them to Besançon for Lycée Louis Pasteur students to finish; the Louis Pasteur kids started a new set of collages that Evans brought back to Charlottesville to be completed at CHS.

Evans also served in a production role for the third piece, “The Ones We Can Still Save,” a sculpture and video collaboration between Charlottesville-based artist Nina Frances Burke and Besançon-based artist Gabriel Hopson. Each artist gave Evans a small package of materials (the one requirement: that it fit in Evans’ suitcase) for the other to use. Hopson, who is diabetic, sent Burke an insulin pen full of the life-saving medication, something he can easily access (and even spare) thanks to French health care, something that is difficult, sometimes impossible, for people to access in the U.S. health care system. The pen was full but unusable, and Burke embedded it, inaccessible, in a nest-like sculpture. Together with Hopson’s video (we won’t give away all the details), it’s a comment on the differences between the American and French health care systems.

One component of “The Ones We Can Still Save,” a collaboration between Charlottesville artist Nina Frances Burke and Besancon artist Gabriel Hopson. Image courtesy the artists

The fourth piece, “The Light Between,” is a video collage Evans made of both moving and still footage of daily life in Besançon and Charlottesville. It’s full of marked differences (architecture, language) and similarities (going to work, dining al fresco) among life in both places. One of Evans’ favorite juxtapositions is around the 1:40 mark—note the power lines in Charlottesville, and the absence of them, in Besançon.

Across all of the works in “This Familiar Space/Cet Espace Familier” there’s evidence of connection of people across time and space. “That’s always been in the show,” says Evans, though the theme might project a bit more right now.

Recognizing the ways in which we’re all connected—and how our own decisions can affect others—is important, says Evans, who considers herself “a global citizen first and an American second.” That realization can complicate our constant internal, highly personal, negotiation between change and routine, already a delicate balance to strike. For Evans, the secret to staying grounded is looking up, thinking about the ever-shifting sky, and “the umbrella that connects us all,” she says.

Two exhibitions connect through travel at Second Street Gallery

Maybe it’s a cheap conceit for a writer, but there are times when it’s necessary to state the obvious: One of art’s prime functions is to take you somewhere else.

In a riveting moment of contemplation, art conveys you to a deeper plane of thought, motivates you to cultivate an unexpected appreciation of the previously mundane and, in the best cases, inspires your own flight. This is how the works of Alonzo Davis and Stacey Evans succeed as noble platforms for intimate, introspective transport.

Alonzo Davis and Stacey Evans
Second Street Gallery
Through April 28

Featured in Second Street Gallery’s latest exhibition, both artists examine our innate desire to explore, and incorporate travel as a unifying theme of their distinct approaches. Davis’ mixed media pieces traverse eras as they recall the imposing challenge of crossing oceans, while Evans’ layered photographs transform landscapes ever-changed by humanity, documenting ephemeral views only glimpsed from behind the windows of a passenger train. Both artists share observations specific enough to call personal, yet still so vastly hatched that they support an inclusive array of divergent interpretations.

Consider the fused bamboo, encaustics and vibrant LED of “Navigation Series.” Alighting the walls of Second Street’s larger space, Davis’ works merge the elemental with the technological in his take on Micronesian navigation stick charts. Originally frameworks representing Marshall Islands waterways, the charts were traditionally the tools of individuals who would likely be the sole interpreters of their own skillful configurations; in Davis’ hands, the viewers must define the potential connotations. As captains of our own voyages, the natural and electrical maps tease at direction, hint at religious symbolism and glow with the gravity involved in choosing which way to go next.

"Navigation Chart #3," by Alonzo Davis. Courtesy of the artist — “Navigation Chart #3,” by Alonzo Davis. Courtesy of the artist

Davis offers imprecise guidance about the hazy meanings of his designs, saying the arrangements function as “a reminder of how we navigate through the changes being brought about in 2017.” In our newfound contentious age, his point becomes clearer in the boat shapes of “From Here to There” and “Made of Immigrants.” Crafted in a similar bamboo-LED style, the titles contextualize the pieces in shallow political waters, underscoring the significance of seeking out new lands.

The “Navigation Series” also incorporates collage paintings ornamented by bamboo and animal bone-carved hand shapes; the overlapping textures of the “Reach Out Series” unify Davis’ influences from his trips through West Africa, Brazil, Haiti and the American Southwest. Proffering a distillation of travel-influenced folk art touches refracted through the lens of his Alabama upbringing, 30 years living in Los Angeles and five in Maryland, Davis invites our self-directed excursions into his abstractions.

Like Davis, travel motivates the creations of locally based photographer Evans. Capturing images of the passing terrain from trains, she’s collected an extensive stock of engaging pictures from which to choose for her fascinating technique: Photos are edited, cut into contours suggested by the subjects and overlaid to produce fresh, impossible landscapes of profound depths and ominous heights. Second Street’s Dové Gallery houses “Ways of Seeing,” Evans’ series of 2’x2′ or 3’x2′ archival pigment-enlarged prints and a smattering of hand-sized original cut photo works aptly measured in inches.

From the bright circular chads ornamenting “Miniature Constructs #1-4” to the ocean wave-like swaths of stacked skies in “Interdependence,” the works give us views of rare, absurd geology and the undiscovered fissures of overcrowded cities. And though the show’s title alludes to the subjectivity of vision, Evans’ evocative photographic collages provide the kind of worthwhile experience that no time spent following her train treks could ever replicate; these are her novel perceptions. This manifold confluence of perspectives grows an extraordinary reinvention of our world, illuminating transient vistas without any intrusion of the fantastic or aid of the computer generated. Incredibly, the banal subject matter of the images awe with the kind of surprise we tend to reserve for the blurry products of extrasolar satellites and confusing subatomic realms of multimillion-dollar electron microscopes.

“Rubble in America” piles trash upon more trash, “American Dumpster” drops a crowded trailer lot over a desert scene, and “Artifacts Left Behind” deploys a tiered automotive graveyard amassed beneath a raised freeway overpass; all three deftly reflect Evans’ railway vantages, the umbral portions of our national corridors and the unpleasant byproducts of our wanderlust, hardly requiring commentary beyond photo and title.

Zooming in for the “Shift in Perspective” pieces, the close-up works downplay or obscure the original subjects altogether by emphasizing the shapes of her cut photos. The resulting compositions improvise with forms and colors in an exploration of unfamiliar surfaces and kaleidoscopic atmospheres whipped up right in her studio.

Equipped with precious trophies snatched from her expeditions, Evans says that she usually starts her collage photo pieces “with a Pandora station and a pair of scissors.” Simple. But that’s all she needs to take us over the next horizon.