Press Release

Gravitational Waves is the second solo exhibition of Margaret Evangeline at Kim Foster Gallery. The exhibition’s title was in part inspired by the announcement of the proof of Einstein’s 70-year-old prediction of the existence of gravitational waves. The artist recently had a dinner conversation at KentPresents with the renowned physicist Kip Thorne whose research led to the proof of Einstein’s theory, capturing the sound of two black holes colliding at the birth of our universe some 1.3 billion light years away.

Evangeline wrote “ …I was compelled by the sound of the fleeting chirp of the collision of two black holes in part because my work processes personal and familial mythologies. This event was heard and recorded in Livingston Parish, Louisiana near my birth place. I never suspected that research of this import was happening there. ” The Louisiana event propelled her to act. Years before she learned from a fellow resident at Santa Fe Art Institute to follow the faintest traces of what you cannot understand because somewhere on Earth there will be someone doing work that provides the support for yours. “I just didn’t expect it to come from the field of science…”

Seeing a conceptualized illustration of energy inside a black hole struck her as the drawings she made of camellias from her mother’s garden. Evangeline claims that her mother’s camellias felt important and that she knew that they would inspire something some day when she was ready. The artist believes that we are built to understand the world through patterns of accidents and coincidences.

Margaret Evangeline’s long painting practice has been the result of devotion to the vulnerabilities of the discovery process, of finding one’s way to significant content through maintaining a stance of openness to failure. Describing what Evangeline mindfully does and how she does it is to say that her paintings and sculpture resemble a flowing river or stream. Each time a viewer gazes at an Evangeline work the viewer steps into metaphorically resonating yet different waters. That same viewer remains aware that what is being perceived is poetically connected with everything else of the artist’s work that has previously been experienced, or that one is likely to engage with in her as yet unrealized work.Through this context it becomes clear that Margaret Evangeline’s abstractions have a singularly pronounced revelatory character that makes them uniquely unsettling and memorable.

Margaret Evangeline is a New York-based, Louisiana-born painter who has received numerous awards including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant. Evangeline’s work has received wide coverage in publications such as Sculpture (cover story,) Art in America, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Art Newspaper, and ArtNews. Evangeline’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Her work is in the permanent collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Rose Art Museum, the Tucson Museum of Art, the McNay Museum, the Fields Sculpture Park / Art Omi, among others. She has produced several site specific installations including a floating work on the River Thames in London. A mid-career monograph entitled Margaret Evangeline: Shooting Through The Looking Glass has been published by Charta Art Books. Evangeline’s work was most recently featured in the solo exhibition Sabachthani at Michigan State’s new Eli and Edythe Broad Museum of Art.

Gallery Opening Video