Keith Evans

Keith Evans is an artist and activist who has been working and performing in the Bay Area for 25 years. Collaboration and co-creation has been a core element of his artistic practice having co-founded the experimental cinematic trio silt in 1989 as well as participating in many duos, groups and ensembles including most recently with Thingamajigs performance group. He creates artwork in a cross-media array, using language, graphics, book arts, installation, kinetic sculpture, dance, film, video and sound, primarily for performance or with an expanded idea of performativity. The histories of imaginative media devices for altering consciousness find their way into his performances. His artworks are translation systems, fascination devices, extra-cinematic experiences that reveal the phenomenon and the idea of cinema as an ecology and system--one that is unfixed and accreting, neither nostalgic nor utopian. His work is concerned with the ephemeral and interpretive, the continuums of perception and materiality, drawing attention to our connection with the earth. He interrogates the blurred spaces, those cultural zones of collaboration, participation and translation that are the most determined by language and yet, the most free to query our direct experiences. His work has been presented in galleries, museums and cinemas all over the world including Asia, Europe, Australia and North America. Selections include NYMOMA, CMA, SFMOMA, LACMA and the 2002 Whitney Biennial. He lives in Bolinas with his wife and young son.

Project Statement: Saint Francis' song of praise is staged as a surrealist radio drama of star-charts, stray dogs and shipbuilders. Evans uses the cinematic ideas of the close up and the panorama to explode the gallery space. The observer is an actor in the setting above and below in the hole, a former sand-casting pit in the gallery floor. Curiosity and radio-waves throw perspectives and projections that light the moving panorama box 25' high up on the opposite end of the gallery which can be viewed in detail with a telescope. A lenticle can be a window into a system of displaying time; where each onlooker is connected to the mystery of gravity and what holds us down.

Lenticle to the Sun
Mixed media installation
Dimension varies
2016