IMOGEN EVESON VISUAL PORTFOLIO A SELECTION OF PHOTOGRAPHS, TYPOGRAPHY AND LAYOUTS 2010 - 2014
I remember that I was staying in St Petersburg that winter and Ethleen Staley called me and told me that someone had come into her gallery and asked if I would be interested to exhibit in a new gallery—very special—in London. That they were interested in me because of the type of images they had seen and they thought they would lend themselves very well to the space in the gallery. They wanted them to be made extremely large. And since I did a lot of strange landscapes and interiors (often run down and abandoned with a lot of grain that would be sort of perfect for their space as it was an old water works building). I did not see the Wapping Project space until I went there for the opening and to install the rest of the exhibition (they had already mounted the very largest images). I remember being in shock! I had exhibited many times in alternative spaces—some quite bizarre—but never any like that and I could finally completely understand why she was interested in my work for her space! Even, upon mounting the staircase to the roof to find a trough of water (it was a water tower!) with a partial image of the bathhouse reflected in it—suspended waveringly above—was totally unexpected and new! Below, on the lowest floor I was told to plan my installation of the rest (several very large prints in a narrative series (several groups of these) which normally would have been impossible in a normal sized gallery held no obstacles on those exposed brick walls! It began to take on the atmosphere of some ancient avant-garde theatre performance in a castle in Eastern Europe. I think this was the point as I learned that Jules had been a theatre producer before and was drawn to the same theatre groups and directors in Eastern Europe and Russia that I had seen. (I had done a series in Krakow set around the disbanded Cantor Theatre that had intrigued her.) There was also a kind of abandoned winter garden shed or work room for plants on the side that could also be utilised— perfect for another narrative about a story to do with women trapped inside a Glass House. Because of the space it was possible to do an extensive exhibit of large prints. They were on rough art paper and mounted just with giant pins stuck in them (or nails, I’ve forgotten). It was rather like a work in progress in a studio. Or like tryouts for posters for films. This was a huge departure from what you would normally see in a gallery. Even the huge, huge prints over the bar interspersed with the industrial pipes. One of these—my favourite—had the look of a constructivist Madonna— all steel tones, the slash of red paint on her hand through the window…. One narrative collage (20 feet long, about women trapped inside an abandoned half-destroyed Glass House—Winter Garden—laid down on a metal trough in the partial shed for plants and flowers) looked like The Blitz in The Second World War. All this—the setting—dramatised the photographs, the atmosphere in the pictures.
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Part three
News I explore the
Irving Penn Portraits exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery, take a surreal trip to Fashionably Curious at 118 Stafford Terrace and visit the seminal
Yves Saint Laurent retrospective in Paris. I also preview the Sadler’s Wells ballet
Eonnagata, the only theatre production for which Alexander McQueen ever designed costumes, and run through
Art and design exhibitions with a modernistic bent in the UK and Europe this summer
yohJi making waveS 2011
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