Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to present Buried Sky, the debut New York solo exhibition of mixed-media works by Jeremy Everett. Everett, a 31-year-old American artist, is interested in natural chemical processes and in finding ways to harness them to create richly textured works of art.
The exhibition will feature abstract "decay drawings", which the artist makes by burying small color photographs under several inches of soil, allowing chemicals in the earth, over time, to affect the character and appearance of their surfaces. It will also include some unusual abstract works--books, newspapers and magazines that Everett submerges in chemical solutions, resulting in elegantly eerie objects covered in color-saturated, crystalline crusts. Everett says he enjoys using such processes to produce "colors and forms of mark-making" he has not seen before; often, he notes, he uses the "studies in abstraction" that result from such creative experiments as the starting points for large-scale, abstract paintings made with colored computer-printer inks applied to vinyl sheets.
Everett uses his hands to rub four colors of ink--cyan, magenta, blue and key (black), the four components of the CMYK color-separation process for printing full-color images--onto the surfaces of large vinyl sheets. His paint kit also includes Pepto-Bismol, the popular, pink antidiarrheal liquid medicine that contains bismuth subsalicylate. The artist says: "It's the perfect pink, and when it dries, it leaves a chalky residue that is similar to marble dust." Later, he scrapes and rubs off these dried paint surrogates from the vinyl sheets and draws into them with abrasive tools to create abstract images that seem to hover above their support surfaces with an ethereal air. "I'm interested in raw materials and in a primitive-feeling, very physical approach to painting," Everett says.
Jeremy Everett holds a B.A. in landscape design from Colorado State University and an M.A. in visual studies from the University of Toronto. Everett has exhibited with Roberts and Tilton in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in several group exhibitions at venues that include the Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, Rivington Arms and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. His work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Modern Painters and Flash Art among other periodicals.