Tim Evans‘ unique watercolor paintings reference Manga and often the female nude in some rather interesting ways. Heads and bodies are juxtaposed for a disorienting effect, and extensive use of bright colors further confuse the senses. His work is being shown at The Proposition in New York, along with Mike Park starting tomorrow, June 4th as part of the exhibition Not Exactly a Mountain. An opening reception takes place this Saturday. Hit the jump for more information.

Not Exactly a Mountain - Mike Park & Tim Evans
June 4 – June 28
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 7, 6-8 pm

at THE PROPOSITION
559 West 22nd Street | New York, NY 10011 | info@theproposition.com | www.theproposition.com | 212.242.0035
The Proposition is pleased to present Not Exactly a Mountain, a two-person exhibition in the Main Gallery featuring new paintings by Mike Park, in addition to new watercolors by Tim Evans (some of which are also featured in Blacklight Burner, now playing in the Project Room).

The often whimsical and densely meandering narrative work of Mike Park is driven by his experiences living and working in the remote industrial sprawl of east Oakland, California. Anti-heroic, metonymically charged, and often sexually ambiguous, Park’s polymer coated acrylic paintings on wood are a pointed yet playful counter-attack on socially prescribed notions of narrative and sexual inhibition. At times dark and menacing, but always oddly uplifting, the power of Park’s work lies in its ability to oscillate between the industrial warble of his immediate surroundings and the inner reaches of his imagination, where desire, loss and self-deprecation meld into an orgiastic melange of androgynous allure.

Tim Evans works on paper are playful distortions of the figural tradition, containing disarmingly pornographic nudes patched together from disparate sources including internet porn-sites, Japanese manga and anime, and the artist’s own transformative
imagination. Done in watercolor, these paintings collapse representative space and realistic rendering; they are at once familiar and disorienting, contrasting graphic precision against the fluidity of the medium as nascent narratives struggle against iconographic implosion.

Unabashedly taking manga and anime as a stylistic point of reference, Tim Evans’ artworks connect to a tradition of visual storytelling that allow for greater personal and transgressive freedom without directly transcribing that tradition’s most superficial characteristics. Instead, the artist strips loaded imagery of meaning, deliberately mistranslating coded contexts into a lyrical point of no return.

For additional information, please contact Ronald Sosinski. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday 11-6.

Blacklight Burner – Mike Park, Tim Evans & Jason Smith

In the Project Room, The Proposition presents Blacklight Burner, a collaborative video animation by Tim Evans, Mike Park and Jason Smith.

Largely inspired by Hakim Bey’s TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, the animation’s central character is a robot featuring a modified scorpion exoskeleton. Programmed with Bey’s mantra, “Art as crime; crime as art,” the robot utilizes its tail to spray graffiti in an act of “Poetic Terrorism,” “vandalizing what must be defaced,” and thereby “loaning some grace” to an otherwise sterile row of buildings.

The title of the animation originates from two incongruent ideas; Blacklight, coming from the ultraviolet/fluorescent light source used to locate and observe scorpions in their naturally nocturnal habitat and Burner, referring to the slang term used to identify a work of graffiti (originally, an entire building or train) as a very good piece, with bright colors that seem to burn out of the wall.

By NYT