Resident Artist Evan Locke creates Immediacy Protracted
By Contributor
Oxygen Art Centre is pleased to host artist Evan Locke as this summer’s Artist in Residence. Locke is an installation artist originally from New Brunswick who now resides in Victoria, BC. During his residency, Locke will construct a large-scale painting as a sculptural piece designed specifically for the Oxygen Art Centre space.
Evan Locke will be in residence from June 4th to June 13th. The artist will hold open studio sessions from 1-5 p.m. on Wednesdays through Saturdays during the run of his residency. Those interested can drop in to meet the artist and watch the progression of his installation.
The residency will culminate in an exhibition of this site-specific installation piece, Immediacy Protracted beginning on Saturday, June 15th and closing on Friday, July 12th.
There will be an opening reception on Friday, June 14th from 7 – 9 p.m. Locke will give a talk about his project on Saturday, June 15th at 4 p.m. The gallery hours during the run of the exhibition are from 1-5 p.m. from Wednesday through Saturday.
The artist states that the intention of the project is to “explore the impacts of scale and architectural spatial relationships” as they relate the tradition of painting. The physical size of the piece with approximately 400 square feet of canvas and it’s supporting wooden structural apparatus make it “visibly evident that the work cannot leave the space without being dismantled”.
The artist, in exposing and inverting the physicality of painting intends the piece to function as a way to “reveal the nature of its own existence where the application of paint is wholly facilitated by the support structures themselves”. This project extends the artist’s interest in promoting a conscious awareness of architectural space and the viewer’s presence within it.
Locke’s structural paintings bring to mind Abstract Expressionism with its use of colour fields and the performative aspects evident in gestural strokes of paint. However Locke’s practice moves away from this tradition in that it seeks “ to provide an immediate affront to the expected psychological aesthetic experience too often associated with painting”.
In this regard, the artist seeks to de-myth the illusionary nature of painting, of the creative act as one of individual genius, rather Locke in his chosen transparency of the painting’s physical structure seeks to speak to the “labour, construction and tactile aspects” of the process which perhaps afford a common access to the act itself.
ABOUT Evan Locke
Evan Locke recently completed a Masters of Fine Art in Visual Arts at the University of Victoria where he also received a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Locke has shown his work around Victoria and the lower Mainland including solo exhibitions at the Audian Gallery at the University of Victoria and in the Hatch Gallery at University of British Columbia. He has been in many group shows including Shapeshifter, (Audain Gallery, Victoria) In Cahoots (Synergy) (Slide Room Gallery, Victoria), Fool’s Day (Ministry of Casual Living, Victoria). During his graduate studies he was a teaching assistant in the sculptural department at the University of Victoria. Locke has been on the design team of Number 10 Architectural Group since 2006. Immediacy Protracted will be his first exhibition in the Kootenay region.
