Spazio22 is proud to present “Perspex: american shift” curated by Franklin Evans, painter and
installation artist who has been represented by FL GALLERY since 2005. Evans was born in Reno, NV
and lives and works in New York, NY. The 12 American artist included in the exhibition are: Amanda
Church, Anthony Iacono, Brian Alfred, David Humphrey, Elliott Green, Eric Wolf, Ezra Johnson,
Jackie Gendel, John Dilg, Kate Gilmore, Matthew F Fisher, and Pedro Barbeito.
“Perspex: american shift” presents work to that varying degrees reflects a repositioning related to the
major cultural and global socio-political shifts that we have experienced over the past twenty years,
including the most recent repositioned America of amplified cultural polarities. The art world and
artists are not immune to this change.
“During the past twenty years, I have discovered and/or explored the work of these artists. They all
work in the United States, crossing the country from New York to Iowa to Los Angeles, so perhaps
producing from a vantage point of geographic specificity. Some work seems to consciously slow
our experience, allowing us to see more, slowly, and in full absorption. Some work embeds windows
into windows, pictures into pictures, clean yet complex spaces of ambiguity. Who watches? How?
And what? Other work uses contemporary distance filters, the cleaned-up pixels of the image read
through screens, social media, and a sense of digital global proximity performed in the ubiquitous
social media image feeds.” – Franklin Evans 2019.
All of the work is painting (or arguably so), which seems strange in our digital age and half a century
beyond painting’s proscriptive death. These artists make their work, aware of art’s history and the
cultural present, but are also acutely involved in their specific and powerful ownership of their
individual artistic practices. Even when art absorbs the world around itself, it is powerfully personal
and experimental, a creative laboratory that shifts within its own space surrounded by or surrounding
the world beyond.