ART CITIES:Los Angeles-Fred Eversley
Fred Eversley is one of a group of artists associated with the 1960s L.A. “finish fetish” movement that paralleled Minimal Art in New York. Eversley developed a process that involves spinning liquid plastic around a vertical axis until the centrifugal forces create a concave surface. Evoking mirrors or large optical lenses, many of Eversley’s sculptures incorporate parabolic curves.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo David Kordansky Gallery Archive
The exhibition “Recent Sculpture” features the first new work Fred Eversley made over the last two years in New York, where he has been living and working after leaving the Venice, California studio he had previously occupied for five decades. The exhibition includes constellations of unique “Parabolic Lenses” and a group of rare horizontal lenses whose subtleties of pooled color provide a dynamic evolution of Eversley’s vocabulary and a different physical perspective by which to experience his concerns with energy. Taken together, the works in the show find Eversley exploring new chromatic relationships and the broadest spectrum of transparency and luminosity. As in any far-reaching study, his decision to hold some variables constant—size, shape, basic materiality—allows him to push against the boundaries of the known. Within the defined parameters of each lens, he creates the potential for a microcosm of the visible universe to emerge: a set of phenomena whose universality is always rooted in the intimate, kinetic encounter between an abstract, primary form and its human subject.
Fred Eversley was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1941. His father was an aircraft engineering executive for Republic Aviation. Eversley initially followed that path, attending Brooklyn Technical High school and then Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he received a degree in electrical engineering. Postponing an opportunity to pursue medicine and bio-medical engineering, Eversley first came to Southern California with the intention of temporarily entering the aerospace industry, and was employed at Wyle Laboratories, as a senior project engineer. In 1967 after a serious car accident he decided to quit his job to pursue a career in art. He is producing multicolor, multilayer cast polyester sculptures informed by his knowledge of technology, scientific principles, the properties of various materials and his ability to develop his own specialized tools to manipulate them. Spinning liquid resin and dyes in molds affixed to turntables fashioned from lathes, potter’s wheels, and repurposed industrial machinery, he produced sculptures that in turn initiated a focused yet open-ended body of work that continues to the present day. By adjusting the saturation of his dyes or pigments, the thickness of each layer of poured resin, the amount of catalyst responsible for eventually hardening it, and the speed at which he spins the mold, Eversley creates the Parabolic Lenses, disc-like objects that contain a wide variety of chromatic effects and varying degrees of transparency. These features only fully emerge after each sculpture undergoes a long polishing process whose technical and physical demands far exceed those of the casting itself. Eversley says: “The parabola happens to be the only mathematic shape that concentrates all forms of known energy to the same single focal point”. While some of the works on view in the exhibition shift the old color combination into new orders, others are radiant two- and three-color lenses that make use of the entire color spectrum. Also on view are monochromatic lenses so saturated or dark that they appear to be completely opaque mirrors. In its own way, each of these works demonstrates how Eversley reveals fundamental properties of energy by harnessing time, gravity and centrifugal force to create parabolic forms and distribute color and matter within them.
Photo: Fred Eversley, Untitled (parabolic lens), (1974) 2020, cast polyester, 19 1/2 x 19 5/8 x 5 7/8 inches (49.5 x 49.8 x 14.9 cm), © Fred Eversley, Courtesy the artist and David Kordansky Gallery
Info: David Kordansky Gallery, 5130 W. Edgewood Pl., Los Angeles, Duration: 12/1-2/3/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00 (by appointment only, book here), http://davidkordanskygallery.com
