Erica Everage

Exhibition Images + Recordings: View.

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SELECT PRESS

+ TV Interview (KCAL NEWS, CBS NEWS Los Angeles: October 16, 2023).

+ Interview (VoyageLA: December 11, 2023).

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Process-driven and oriented around specific materials, Everage works between color, texture, and structure while evolving ancient or abandoned imagery in contemporary forms. Folding the past into the present, she refinds blurry connections between history and memory, with attention to perennial—though perhaps forgotten—symbols that epigenetically determine relations between gendered modes of embodiment and (recognizable) categories of identity. At its most rudimentary level, her work presents figures and glyphs as interlocutors between bodies, remains, and realities.

In particular, many of the figures from which she works in abstraction are feminine Western deities or idol-types—such as the “Sheela na gig”—placed along pathways or above doors (or any portal-like structure): guardians of a hole marking a hovel. At the same time, her use of interstitial materials, such as burlap and artificial turf sub-base, suggests that this engagement with voids per voided, discarded, or in-between substances begins on the level of the substrates of her work. Confronting patriarchal notions of openings or holes as mere absence (of the phallus), she works with a void as a surface or object in itself, and not necessarily as an emptiness.

Initially, her work deconstructs formations of feminine (or feminized) archaeological subjects through layered, germinated surfaces suggestive of rubble or urban decay—but still brimming with life along the pollen-like quarries of pigments. Ultimately, her movement toward reclaimed or recycled sources—while employing contrastive natural pigments on human-made materials—across every mode of her multi-faceted practice results in a critical entanglement with extraction economies, and quiet interrogations of the relations that take-hold between an artwork and its materials. (This economic principle of her work is also performed by her piling of pigments: her “drawing” or “painting” practice is played out through a kind of accumulation. But remember: accumulation is as much a result and residue of extraction as it is a regenerative principle of planetary life—like seeds being sown into soil.)

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Bio

Erica Everage (b. 1987, Los Angeles, CA) is an L.A.-based visual artist. She won a Los Angeles Music Center Spotlight Award in 2005 for her drawing, which earned her an apprenticeship with the late sculptor Robert Graham, who taught her to sculpt. Erica has a BA in Theatre from Northwestern University and an MFA in Fine Art from Otis College of Art and Design. Her passions for history, feminism, storytelling, and dance all inform her current work as a painter. Some of the most recent presentations of her work include a solo exhibition titled In Her Image at Hotel Figueroa in Los Angeles (on view through February 2024), as well as a group exhibition with The Cooler x Reclaim in Fresno, CA.

{Biographical Information Courtesy of the Artist}

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Exhibitions with the Gallery

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