Up Close and Unimaginable: Cliff Evans and Gregory Green

UP CLOSE AND UNIMAGINABLE

Sponsored by Alice and Dean Fjelstul, Gene and Lee Seidler, and the State of Florida,

Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture.

Front, top to bottom: Cliff Evans, The Road to Mount Weather (detail of still), 2006, Three-channel moving image installation (15 minute loop), Courtesy of the artist; Gregory Green, Worktable #6 (Chicago, IL) (detail), 1997, Mixed media, Dimensions variable, Courtesy of Aeroplastics Contemporary, Brussels, Belgium.

UP CLOSE AND UNIMAGINABLE Cliff Evans and Gregory Green January 31 - February 28, 2019

Wasmer Art Gallery Florida Gulf Coast University Art Galleries

UP CLOSE AND UNIMAGINABLE Cliff Evans and Gregory Green

Top to bottom: Cliff Evans, The Road to Mount Weather (detail of still), 2006, Three-channel moving image installation (15 minute loop), Courtesy of the artist; Gregory Green, Worktable #6 (Chicago, IL) (detail), 1997, Mixed media, Dimensions variable, Courtesy of the artist.

INTRODUCTION

John Loscuito, Gallery Director Anica Sturdivant, Assistant Curator

Florida Gulf Coast University Art Galleries The FGCU Art Galleries has consistently responded to contemporary issues throughout its exhibition history. The relevance of Up Close and Unimaginable however is not to be celebrated. Throughout history artists have used a variety of methods to bring attention to acts of violence and global conflicts. Cliff Evans and Gregory Green continue this tradition using video and sculptural installations that reflect current events and the tense sociopolitical atmosphere resulting from the influence of violence in the world.

Artists such as Francisco Goya, Kathe Kollwitz, and Magdelena Abakanowicz have created art that protests the inhumanity and suffering brought on by war and and violent acts. In Francisco Goya’s painting, The Third of May, 1808 in Madrid, or “The Executions”, 1814, the brutalities of war are depicted through his scene of Spanish resistance fighters executed by Napolean’s army.

Goya broke from the heroic epic fashion of depicting war and created a personal relationship between the executed men and the viewer through his composition.

Much like Goya, Cliff Evans and Gregory Green use their own devices to place the viewer within uncomfortable situations. Cliff Evans critiques media consumption and its relationship to violence, while Gregory Green’s pieces allow the viewer to personally engage the politically charged subject matter. To further the intellectual discourse around the works, contributing authors, Richard Coughlin and Sabin Bors̗ have provided their perspectives on these difficult subjects.

It has been our privilage to conceive of this project in service to Florida Gulf Coast University.

Lastly, we would like to acknowledge the considerable efforts of the artists, writers, FGCU students, exhibition sponsors, and the public’s support in the realization of this project.

Cliff Evans, The Road to Mount Weather (cast of characters composite), 2006, Three-channel moving image installation (15 minute loop), Courtesy of the artist.

RICHARD COUGHLIN, PH.D.

Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Administration Florida Gulf Coast University

ART AND SPECTACLE The Spectacle “The spectacle,” wrote French critic Guy Debord in his landmark book The Society of Spectacle, “…is the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue….[its] self portrait of power.” The spectacle is the media’s colonization of reality, which forms the ideological enclosures in which we live. The works exhibited in Up Close and Unimaginable interrupt the spectacle with humor, terror and hope.

Road to Mount Weather Mount Weather, in Western Maryland, is where the political elite of Washington D.C. would go in the case of a nuclear conflict. Cliff Evan’s Road to Mount Weather uses images retrieved from Google searches to depict such a scenario. The conflagration begins in the back of a drivein theater in North Dakota where nuclear missiles are launched as evening falls. Then smoke billows from cities while attack planes fly overhead. Citizens, led by cheerleaders, defiantly assemble. The scene shifts: people are emerging from piles of rubble while the military engages in reconstruction amidst signs of muted protest. The scene shifts again: people rendered homeless by the war cheer wildly for football heroes in a massive stadium.

This sequence of scenes is hardly realistic, but the images are. The images are familiar because they are iconic. But Evans has recombined them in an ideologically disorienting fashion. I would like to underscore a particular meaning of ideology here: it is the subject’s (our) imagined relationship to reality, a relationship which is deeply mediated by the images we routinely encounter and which form the image-laden reality of the spectacle.

Evans combines these images to develop a dissonant and incongruous story of war in which narrative threads, composed of bizarre image collages, point in multiple directions. What does

it mean, for example, for us to encounter Pat Robertson behind a naked woman behind whom stands a devil with the entire ensemble of characters situated in front of a mega-church that is ensconced within an oil refinery? And this is only part of the image collage that unfolds here.

Nor does this description account for the soundtrack of the video, which adds another layer of meaning to Evans’ assemblage.

These images - indeed, all images - are highly fungible. They can be combined and modified, as Evans does through the use of photoshop, to create all sorts of provocative arrangements.

The familiar becomes strange. Of course, Evans’ google images have long since been torn out of their original contexts, but they remain frozen in their original postures and gazes as they become recombined in novel ways. Their familiar gazes and unfamiliar juxtapositions render them powerless, absurd and perhaps even subversive.

Evans is interested in disrupting accustomed image flows by means of appropriating and re-coding images, inserting them into new plot lines and combining them in uncanny ways.

Evans’ sense of the uncanny reveals a heretical disposition, one which aims to profane the holy, which, in this case, is the solemnity of the spectacle. This is evident in the abundance of grotesque and erotic images that are deployed throughout the work. Red distended flesh hangs from the metallic structures of Mount Weather and oozes from the ramparts of the sacred city contained within. Deformed bodies are fused together and pulsate in the background of the assembled elite while naked women (and the occasional man) appear in erotic poses. They are interspersed throughout the crowd of dignitaries.

At one level, this is just the repertoire of the internet. Evans mobilizes this repertoire unconventionally. Evans remarks that his work sows confusion, but “that such confusion is necessary to subvert the propagandistic and commercial aspects of the forms used.”

For my part, I see not only confusion but a proliferation of connections between images and their interconnected meanings, which are normally far more attenuated and submerged. In Evans’ work, they are recombined in a dreamlike alchemy of subconscious affinities. The result is not a re-edification of the real. The Road to Mount Weather offers, instead, an experience of de-familiarization. The familiar – which is to say, the spectacle - becomes ridiculous and laughable and, as it does, its grasp upon us loosens.

Fear and Hope Gregory Green’s Work Bench bomb sculptures detail the construction of terrorist explosives.

We see everything in the work space except the maker. This individual is indexed by his artifacts.

In Worktable #9, He of Righteousness, these include a worn edition of The Turner Diaries, empty cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer, along with tools and equipment that could be procured at any hardware store. Who is this absent maker? What redemption or regeneration is he seeking through violence?

Gregory Green, Worktable #9, He of Righteousness (detail), 2014, Mixed media installation, 14’x16’x5’, Courtesy of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

We might spare a thought for the absent maker, but Green’s work also draws our attention to the fabrication of explosive devices. These sculpture bombs are a materialization of terror. They underscore the transgressive aspects of Green’s work: the tendency for his work to proceed to the threshold that separates peace and violence. Green’s work does not cross the line, but comes close enough to disturb it. Previous exhibitions have provoked police responses, not because Green broke any law, but because his work illustrates how tenuous our presumptions of order and security really are.

An interesting counterpoint to Green’s bomb sculptures is the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. In his classic work, Leviathan, Hobbes appealed to the fear of death in order to convince people to abandon public life and prudently pursue their private interests under the protection of an all-powerful ruler. The ruler would use his or her power to guarantee everyone’s security and keep the prospect of their violent death at bay. Green confronts us with these prospects.

The bombs planted in bibles or in suitcases of all kinds, or manufactured at workbenches which could be in anyone’s garage, signal the imminence of terrorist violence. We have seen the instruments of destruction laid before us (complete, in some cases, with instructions on how to assemble them); now let us strengthen the Patriot Act even further!

What might neutralize such a response is the fact that Green’s bomb sculptures don’t point to some threatening other (aside, that is, from the absent maker). They are simply objects on the verge of explosion, which place the audience on the cusp of destruction. This may be an artistic experience insofar as the purpose of art is not just to edify, but to push toward uncomfortable extremes. Green’s work mimics a violent reality and thereby activates the imaginative facilities through which we comprehend and experience danger. The danger is not going away anytime soon. Green’s representations of danger can accommodate us to the dangers that really exist.

Perhaps this will spare us from embracing authoritarian solutions at the first sign of trouble.

Green’s Gregnik installation offers hope as a stark contrast to terrorist violence. The installation consists of a sphere inspired and referencing the form of the Soviet Union’s famous Sputnik I communication satellite; the ultimate dream of the ongoing project is to put a version of it in orbit. The purpose of Gregnik is communication, a goal this installation achieves through the deployment of a low power transmitter broadcast reaching most of the FGCU campus grounds that, in this exhibition, will broadcast the hopes and fears of the FGCU students about the future.

Like the bomb sculptures, this also is transgressive art: it is the unauthorized irruption of people’s aspirations into the media spaces that are normally subject to official regulation and control, which also filter reality and construct the spectacle. The point of Gregnik’s transgression is, I think, to experiment with the limits of historical necessity in order to discover new possibilities for community, empowerment and freedom. This is one response to the world; to destroy it is another. Thus Gregnik and Worktable #9 palpably juxtapose contrasting modes of empowerment - terrorist violence and mundane aspirations - which leaves us situated as the intersection of fear and hope.

Gregory Green, Gregnik Proto I, 1997, Installation view, Mixed media, 75 x 45 x 40” / 32’ post, Courtesy Locus+, Newcastle, England.

̗ PH.D. SABIN BORS,

Independent Researcher and Critical Archivist

RESILIENT ASSEMBLIES Whenever confronted with the subject and the aesthetics of certain violence, whether it is embedded in politics or popular culture, it is the ideological construction that dominates the discourse and less the sort of regeneration or redemption that violence may channel. For artists like Gregory Green and Cliff Evans, who usually appeal to the symbols of terror, violence, political control, and media propaganda in their work, addressing the various facets of history as disruptions within the social space constitutes the backbone of their artistic practice. There is a different mythos and different aesthetic grounds at work with each — but seeing Green’s iconic objects and sited sculptural installation opposite the video assembled by Evans consolidates a particularly eerie perspective upon the state of the world and its unraveling uncertainties.

It stands as proof that two radically different generational approaches can complete each other in consolidating a subversive vision based on reversed systemic values and principles.

This reversal points to a social order that evades the structures of power, authority, hierarchy, control, or social norms, as well as the cultural prescriptions around authenticity, to instead transform and expose the bare truths about ourselves in times of profound social conflicts and delusions. That one works primarily with sculpture and the other mostly with video — is what actually binds together a sense of complicity that distorts the boundaries.

Gregory Green’s work has long been surrounded by controversy, the more it has reflected a nascent state of cultural and political emergency. His mid-1980s artworks and performances have explored various systems of control, the complex dialectics of individuals and collectives, or different mechanisms of empowerment. Green’s use of violence and information seeks to elaborate a resilient practice for socio-political change. Whether it’s artistic or activist, whether it conveys a socio-cultural or psychological commentary — his gesture provides a provocative portrayal of past and, possibly, future historical events by interfering with the structures of power and the narratives of control. His different tables, the various drives and psychologies that he gives form to, the shifting focus from what remains utterly uncontrollable and outside

our reach to the methodical destruction of the worlds — are just as many scenarios of crude violence as they are raw aesthetic compositions. For it would be misleading to understand the motif of the victim or Green’s attraction to specific elements like pipe bombs within the regime of violence and victimization, that is, as vehicles or mechanisms attuned to the choreographies of power. Instead, one should see them as signaling devices for one’s resilience and an act of resistance. They have a sociopolitical and aesthetic function that actively mediate the circus of the spectacle, for both the conceptual signifiers and the conflicted viewers entering the gallery space. This is a political and psychological gesture that ultimately defines not only violent radicals but conceptual radicals too.

What may well be the most transparent reflection of this radicalization is the sense of tactility that Green’s sculptures evoke — the fact that they could be held, could be manipulated, and could cause damage beyond one’s control, anytime and unexpectedly. Not knowing what Gregory Green, Worktable #6 (detail), 1995, Mixed would happen outlines a tension taken media, 56 x 93 x 132”, Installation view at Aeroplastics to dangerous extremes that activates Contemporary, Courtesy of Aeroplastics Contemporary, imaginative faculties and fiery imaginaries; Brussels, Belgium. not knowing who their maker is, adds to the uncertainty and anxiety — it could well be anyone or none at all. Such a sense of absence or anonymity creates a tense atmosphere of inquietude, restlessness, and violent anticipation. The physicality, the visceral reaction to the objects, and the direct tactile relations outline a space of materialization underlined by transgressive gestures. The material and design detailing

that goes into these sculptures gives them a sense of range, accuracy, potency, and lethality amplified only by the lack of a specific context other than the work itself and its display in the exhibition. That functional deviations affect aesthetic appeal and vice-versa is proof that Green’s sculptures are not representational but could be understood as procedural artifacts.

As such, seeing Green’s workbenches is nothing short of an education in the modern inventory and vocabulary of violent resilience.

To enter the gallery space and be greeted by a worktable covered with references and materials that may help one to build bombs, is to perceive this sculptural and artisanal assemblage as a dissenting blueprint for radical intervention and a radical break with the constraints of the current condition. It is to understand that authority has been refuted in the name of a radical principle of disorder that may unshackle individuals and provide catharsis only at the price of extreme destruction. Like in his other works, where LSD or Molotov cocktails entertain associated motifs, the worktable entertains a series of political socio-pathologies. Whether it’s revenge, frustration, insurrection, or desperation, they echo a different type of political consciousness and engagement that no longer tenders to a social corpus. It seeks to re-appropriate or unravel power Gregory Green, Gregnik Proto II, 1998, Installation view, Mixed through an ostensible form of dissent media, 90 x 60 x 60” / 32’ post, Courtesy of The Public Art and precarious means of expression. But Fund, NY, New York. the worktable also has another quality to it — the assemblage reflects a certain weariness of the meta-languages, a refusal of the ordered (art) constructions that would remythologize its constituent parts. It is remarkably simple and direct, deliberately stripped of anything but its immediate resources, functions, and purpose — a mirror of he who has lost his traits, he who chooses to remain anonymously, an unknown person who has just left the room

or someone who is yet to return ardently to the misruling table. This aspect becomes more evocative in contrast with the video realized by Cliff Evans. Whereas Evans circulates a series of meme-like scenes and profiles across an artificial panorama, Green’s work makes manifest the alienation of the maker from all the impersonal images and personas.

The Gregnik installation creates a stark contrast to terrorist or radicalized violence. The satellite broadcasts a signal — recordings of the FGCU students’ hopes and fears for the future that oppose the interior setting, consolidating a different, if not diametrically opposed perspective.

The outside formulates reasons for hope from the yet un-radicalized, the fears that may yet keep violence at bay. If the interior seems to have cut off communication, isolating us into a cell of resilience and devotion that refuses the spectacle of the everyday, the exterior is a space open to communication. The people’s aspirations oppose the media and control space, just as much as the radical isolation of he who breaks the boundaries of historical necessities. It is here that a new community and a form of collective empowerment opposing individualism and misplaced pathos can be found. For it is worth noting that broadcasting may well remain the one resilient medium that attends to the voice of the people and helps to reclaim the social contract that has been blurred by media propaganda. Gregnik is an alternative means of empowerment, one that remains essentially open — whereas the Worktable is a substantially closed environment.

One looks to reach out and share a collective voice — whereas the other keeps in tension the dark and disturbing passions that lie unexamined in the recess of our subconscious.

There is a risk that such motifs may replicate or capitulate to the object of their critique; that such formats and stereotypes may reinforce a claim to dominance and normative discourses.

But the dialogue created between the three interconnected spaces in the exhibition — the ‘basement,’ the artificial space of the media, and the vibrating space of a vocal and coming community — makes it possible to also view Green’s works as proxies designed to destabilize the existing orders. His is a temporary, obscured world of intervention where notions of distraction, obfuscation, suppression, or secrecy — just as well as privacy, security, or activity — are the marks of unmediated proxy agents to be found in a deep state retracted from the outside world.

As non-standard communication systems, these proxies do not tender to representation but make way for a post-representational politics adrift within social and media spaces. The ‘proxy’ brings Green’s work closer to what Beuys has called a “social sculpture” when discussing the potential of art to transform society, that is, a work of art that uses language, objects, and actions to restructure and reshape society. Green’s absent maker is, from this perspective, the expression of an aesthetic and performative act of justice that confronts reality by radical

aesthetic pronouncements. To see Green’s workbenches as ‘sites’ of justice is to be observant of tensions between the social domains of the public and the private. The work of art becomes an artistic device that enacts radically different ethics of subjectivity, a performance of dissent that translates the long road from cultural resilience to violent catharsis and radical reconciliation.

Green’s sculptures need to be understood beyond the functions, norms, codes, standards, and programs that they evoke — they are assemblies of aesthetic justice.

Assemblies also define the digital amalgamations in the video installation presented by Cliff Evans. The language of pictorial representation describes here what I previously called “a virtual realm of hollow spectacles that define our obsessive need to accumulate, organize, and structure reality according to desires, aspirations, and ready-images.” The three separate frames of The Road to Mount Weather — a 3-channel video installation dating back to 2006 — move towards the viewer in a seemingly endless and carnivalesque progression. The images range from soldiers or political figures to busty characters and various social iconographies; their reproduction and animation are deliberately artificial. Everyday imagery has been removed from its context, disjointed, and re-assembled as a powerful and ironic social commentary. It would be easy to look for references in Hieronymus Bosch or the new generation of American digital artists; and it would be limiting to see this only politically, by analyzing the specific references to Mount Weather, the refuge for political elites in case of nuclear conflicts. Evans retrieves images from Google searches to reconfigure the language of pictures and thus develop a dissonant ideology of war, media, and violence.

What does it mean to tell a story with such images? What is the narrative that the artist recomposes? It may be slightly inaccurate to speak of collage in the works of Evans. While his video work is based on the basic construction approach that can be referenced to the history of collage, his compositions are instead an assembly of images and information. Their aesthetic recalls the epic scales of the panoramic and historical paintings. Evans juxtaposes these images and forms with the ubiquitous styles, design, and technology used for website banner advertisements. The elements of this juxtaposition, inspired by Renaissance-era paintings, media clippings, and panoramic visions of the American landscape, reveal a confusing complexity that subverts the propagandistic and commercial character of the forms used. Evans scrapes the Internet looking for imagery and found digital objects that he then reconstructs into an assembly of deviations, truncations, multiplications, and ironic misappropriations.

Frolic, ridicule, and absurdity are mechanisms to blur one’s objectivity and scrutiny of violence, but they also counter the various forms of normalization, whether it’s objects, figures, situations,

or narratives. Fragmentary images and pixelated figures parade across the artificial panorama reflecting something “excessive, flat, quasi-random, and circuitous,” as Evans comments. They produce unexpected, unreal, and hyperbolic scenarios for virtual political subjects that lack the power to fight the forces of control and media manipulation. The world as seen in The Road to Mount Weather is a spectacular reality of alternative constructions that unveil the banality of power, the artificiality of its rhetoric, and the populist mythologies of the contemporary, with all their anxieties, deviations, and false ideals. It is a mediated understanding of the world based on a deviant pop vocabulary of flooding signs, symbols, and iconographic elements, devoid of a specific message. It is not a tale of morality per se, nor an elaborate critique of cultural stereotypes and social signifiers; it is not an accurate reflection of the world, nor is it a misrepresentation of it. This over-stimulating construction looks instead as a proto-archetypal sketch that never really settles for an ultimate expression.

The landscape plays a significant role in our ability to scrutinize and interrogate this world, as the construction of the video organizes the reality of perception in an ordered albeit rattling perspective.

This artificiality helps the viewer to understand the ideological function of the assembly, the theatrical setting where we can explore the debris of human and media interaction.

But the landscape is manifest in another aspect too. As Evans shifts his interest from the industrial information news complex and its propagandistic politics to the abstract and often shapeless intro-outro designs of the news programs’ motion graphics, his newer compositions reflect on the valueless forms of modern entertainment graphics. Evans has pointed out that one aspect that is not immediately present, but which defines both his and Green’s approach, Cliff Evans, The Road to Mount Weather (detail of still), 2006, Three-channel moving image installation (15 minute loop), Courtesy of the artist.

is that the non-stop cycle of news and breaking news provides the cultural, technological, and spectacular grounds that give most of the power to the iconic, symbolic, or stereotypical images and constructs in the work of both artists. The news is what gives gravity, emotional charge, and drive — as images are manipulated through rhythm, motion, and time to create engaging and even conflictual interpolations. Regardless of how we look at The Road to Mount Weather, we are yet to fully comprehend the mechanics of this imagined universe, so characteristic of the post-millennium digital world however so crudely re-presented here.

Social and political critique requires a peculiar economy of attention if they are to speak to the viewer, who is always a voyeur. If the work is the fragmentary reconstitution of a virtualized world stripped to its spectacular attributes, it is also an exploration into a new visual vocabulary that transcends the normative narratives and visual scenarios of recent history. Unsurprisingly then, the resemblance between the reconstitutions created by Evans and the various online memes helps one to reach beyond the images that are randomly discovered or culled from the visual dictionary of pop culture. Here, the visual elements require a meta-cultural lexicon, one that, like in the case of Green, is neither polemical nor representational. The aesthetic decisions behind the process of constructing the work help to channel a sensorial shift in the way that we engage with the panoramic image as an engagement with the world. The digital video work makes use of technology to underline a system of organizing the world that defines the production, manipulation, and dissemination of images today, characteristic of cyberspace, semiotic capitalism, or the interconnections between media, leisure, and entertainment industries — all of which is based on the ideological propaganda of the military complex. As such, The Road to Mount Weather opens a critical reflection on the paradoxes and the role of the technological image in the digital context — that is, an increasingly digital world that continues to perpetuate the normative language of transparency, invisibility, multiplicity, and control.

There is technical sophistication and consistency in the works of both Gregory Green and Cliff Evans, whether one looks at detailed, realistic objects or amalgamated, artificial compositions.

The omnidirectional camera movement in the video realized by Evans, with its rhythmic and continuous take, is balanced by the fixity of Green’s objects. The sound of Evans’ video creates an aural space to Green’s installation, allowing visitors to switch between two opposing states of perception that provides a vital emotional element to the exhibition ensemble. The inability to recognize or to situate the details or the figures in the video contrasts the fully detailed sculptures that give an eerie sense of anxiety at the thought that this might indeed be explosive material left at the hands of visitors. The Internet and the ‘mediascapes’ that reflect

the conventions and limitations of the current social frameworks are opposed by the satellite broadcast that gives corpus to different voices and restores a form of trust in the future. It is seeing these differences together that is bound to give the visitors a new perspective on the works. If one is to attempt an understanding of these works as assemblies, the challenge is to perceive any of them as a medium. All the elements already have a different meaning in the contexts that they’ve been taken from. By obscuring the source or the function, the use or the meaning, these assemblies provide the visitor with a deliberately fragmented experience of the world, one that is bound to stir a renewed socio-political drive, challenge the reason of normativity, and re-represent space again.

History repeats. The political propaganda and media manipulation that emerged in the 1980s, especially from the Republican right, is bound to take a more decisive curve today.

Social and political concerns, manipulation and intimidation, the disruption of information and communication, the threat of exacerbated violence, the oppressive mechanisms of power and control, the seductions of the entertainment industry and the resilience of broadcasting in the face of media and social media, the necessity to reinsert the work into society as a means to open dialogue — these are all issues that continue to unravel our world. The work of both Gregory Green and Cliff Evans is iconic in this context, as artworks that may have seemed outdated return to prominence and look more prescient and significant today, under the sign of urgency and the need for new forms of collective empowerment. If the collage can be understood, following Lévi-Strauss, as both a technique and a state of mind, that is, a transfer of bricolage to the domain of contemplation, these resilient assemblies fulfill a social function that is transferred to the realm of action and intervention — to reclaim now the social and aesthetic justice for tomorrow.

Cliff Evans, The Road to Mount Weather (detail of still), 2006, Three-channel moving image installation (15 minute loop), Courtesy of the artist.

Cliff Evans, The Road to Mount Weather (detail of still), 2006, Three-channel moving image installation (15 minute loop), Courtesy of the artist.

Gregory Green, Worktable #9, He of Righteousness, 2014, Mixed media installation, 14’x16’x5’, Courtesy of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Gregory Green, Worktable #9, He of Righteousness (detail), 2014, Mixed media installation, 14’x16’x5’, Courtesy of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Gregory Green, Worktable #8 (Baltimore) (detail), 2000, Mixed media installation, 11’x12’x 8’, Courtesy of the artist and John Waters.

Gregory Green, Gregnik Proto II, 1998, Installation view, Mixed media, 90 x 60 x 60” / 32’ post, Courtesy of The Public Art Fund, NY, New York.

CLIFF EVANS was born in NSW, Australia and grew up in East Texas.

He graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Evans’ work has appeared and been reviewed in various media and publications including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, and National Public Radio. Cliff Evans has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and the world. Evans’ work has been shown in such spaces as The New Museum, Chelsea Art Museum, and Location One in New York City; The Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston; the Krannert Art Museum in Champaign, Illinois; Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City, Mexico; Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland; Artsonje Museum in Seoul, Korea; and the Today Museum, Beijing, China.

GREGORY GREEN is internationally recognized for his challenging

work and the numerous controversies it has spawned in the USA and Europe. Referencing historical precedents and disturbingly anticipating various historical events, such as the tragedy of 9/11 and the Arab Spring, Green’s provocative works expand the parameters between art and activism, culture and social commentary. His work is included in major public and private collections, including among others the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Tate Gallery, London, the Saatchi Gallery, London, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Mori Museum in Tokyo and MAMCO, Geneva among others.

Editors: John Loscuito, Anica Sturdivant Graphic Designer: Anica Sturdivant Contributing Authors: Sabin Bors, Richard Coughlin, John Loscuito, and Anica Sturdivant Copy Editor: Joanna Hoch Photographic Contributions: Cliff Evans, Gregory Green Bower School of Music & the Arts Staff: John Loscuito, Gallery Director Anica Sturdivant, Assistant Curator Andy Morris, Teaching Laboratory Supervisor Joanna Hoch, Events Coordinator Mary Cooper, Executive Secretary Gallery Assistants: Farrah Alkhadra, Hannah Bautz, Kaitlyn Handley, Marcela Pulgarin, and Sean Shinham

Back: Gregory Green, Worktable #6 (Chicago, IL) (detail), 1997, Mixed media, Dimensions variable, Courtesy of Aeroplastics Contemporary, Brussels, Belgium.

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