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PASSING GLANCES: Stacey Evans Explores Light Perspectives in “This Familiar Space”
BY ERIN O’HARE

C-VILLE WEEKLY5/12/2020

One of the first assignments Stacey Evans gives her photography class is to visit the same place at different times throughout the day, a few days in a row. She tasks her PVCC students with noticing the light, how it’s different minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day. If Monday’s morning light is soft, Tuesday’s might be bright, and Wednesday’s might be grayed by rain.

It’s a practical lesson for an art that relies on light not just for composition but for mood, for atmosphere, for meaning. It’s also a rather practical (and sometimes difficult) lesson for life: Change is constant.

Change is also a major theme in Evans’ own photography. She ruminated on it in “Ways of Seeing,” a series of collages from photos shot through train car windows and exhibited at Second Street Gallery in April 2017. It’s present again in Evans’ current SSG exhibition, “This Familiar Space/Cet Espace Familier,” which opened online last week.

“‘This Familiar Space’ is two years in the making, and the dozens of works that comprise the show were made by artists here in Charlottesville and in Besançon, France, one of Charlottesville’s sister cities.

Evans served as artist, producer, and curator for the show, which is divided into four unique, but related, groups of works. Evans planned to mount it on the walls of SSG’s Dové Gallery, until the space closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and she had to envision and execute it for the web. 

The first segment, “Daily Muse,” is a series of 11 photographs of the same rooftop view in Besançon, taken by Evans on a 2018 Sister Cities Commission trip. Capturing this view from her hotel room became a routine for Evans on the trip, and though the visual perspective is technically the same, none of the photos are. The sky differs, sometimes drastically and sometimes subtly, from image to image, affecting the colors of the building below, the shadows, and the overall tone of the photographs. In the bottom center space of the grid, Evans has written, “This too shall pass,” putting to words what the eyes and the mind have already acknowledged, consciously or not. 

Evans expects the text might resonate deeply with viewers right now, as we’re all eager for the pandemic to pass. But, she says, we’re not always so open to change: We like our routines, too. And the set of photographs presented in “Daily Muse” shows how routine and change are not necessarily opposite, but complementary, co-existent. It’s about “understanding that things aren’t permanent. Change does happen, and [you have to be] okay with change, because if you get stuck in your ways, I don’t see that as a good thing,” either. 

Evans’ role shifts a bit in “Look to See.” She made photographs in both Charlottesville and Besançon, and students altered them into collages. She had Charlottesville High School students start a batch, then brought them to Besançon for Lycée Louis Pasteur students to finish; the Louis Pasteur kids started a new set of collages that Evans brought back to Charlottesville to be completed at CHS.

Evans also served in a production role for the third piece, “The Ones We Can Still Save,” a sculpture and video collaboration between Charlottesville-based artist Nina Frances Burke and Besançon-based artist Gabriel Hopson. Each artist gave Evans a small package of materials (the one requirement: that it fit in Evans’ suitcase) for the other to use. Hopson, who is diabetic, sent Burke an insulin pen full of the life-saving medication, something he can easily access (and even spare) thanks to French health care, something that is difficult, sometimes impossible, for people to access in the U.S. health care system. The pen was full but unusable, and Burke embedded it, inaccessible, in a nest-like sculpture. Together with Hopson’s video (we won’t give away all the details), it’s a comment on the differences between the American and French health care systems.

The fourth piece, “The Light Between,” is a video collage Evans made of both moving and still footage of daily life in Besançon and Charlottesville. It’s full of marked differences (architecture, language) and similarities (going to work, dining al fresco) among life in both places. One of Evans’ favorite juxtapositions is around the 1:40 mark—note the power lines in Charlottesville, and the absence of them, in Besançon. 

Across all of the works in “This Familiar Space/Cet Espace Familier” there’s evidence of connection of people across time and space. “That’s always been in the show,” says Evans, though the theme might project a bit more right now. 

Recognizing the ways in which we’re all connected—and how our own decisions can affect others—is important, says Evans, who considers herself “a global citizen first and an American second.” That realization can complicate our constant internal, highly personal, negotiation between change and routine, already a delicate balance to strike. For Evans, the secret to staying grounded is looking up, thinking about the ever-shifting sky, and “the umbrella that connects us all,” she says.

Nina Burke FINDS BEAUTY IN SPARE PARTS AT MCGUFFEY
BY RAMONA MARTINEZ

C-VILLE WEEKLY 9/13/2019

Nina Frances Burke really hates titling her pieces. So when she had to settle on a name for her solo show at McGuffey Art Center, she turned to her tried and true method: “I’m an obsessive Radiohead fan. And when I need a title and I can’t come up with one, I just comb through Radiohead lyrics to find something that sort of speaks to me, as if it was like the I Ching, which is insane…” She settled on “For Spare Parts They Broke Us Up,” a line from an apocalyptic Thom Yorke song.

Her work calls to mind a more famous lyric: “Cause we are living in a material world / And I am a material girl.” Burke is not interested in the finer things in life, though—she’s interested in trash. Materially speaking, the show consists of found objects in new contexts: delicate mobiles of food packaging; rubble from demolition sites made into sculptural installations; a paper cup that has been run over a hundred times cast into plaster and covered with glitter, mounted among rocks, weeds, and broken tail lights. Burke reclaims this refuse and shows us how it is beautiful.

Each piece is a wordless phrase in a poem, and the poem is equal parts whimsy and tragedy. It’s about commodity culture, loss, gentrification, and how maintaining a child-like interest in the seemingly mundane can be a balm in this crazy world. In “Pull Me Out of the Lake,” three hard drives spray painted ombré pink are stuck low on the wall like barnacles, with moss growing out of them.

Pieces of a porch from an elderly neighbor’s house in Rose Hill form the basis of “Miss Maxine said Better Get a Coat On.”

“Miss Maxine had a house less than a block from me, and almost every day, I would pass her, and she loved to sit on the porch,” says Burke. “And even if I was completely bundled up in the winter, she would always say, ‘You better get a coat on.’ Or she would say, ‘Where’s your coat?’ She should say that like five times a week. And then we would just have this little talk.”

After Miss Maxine’s death, her family had to sell her home to pay off debt. The new owners demolished it. “So there’s a field of rubble where Miss Maxine’s house used to be. So I would just go there everyday and pick through the rubble to get pieces of the porch, because that’s where she is…”

Students of art history may be tempted to place “For Spare Parts They Broke Us Up” in the tradition of Dadaism – cheap and readily available materials in new contexts, political undertones, punk as heck. Dada does like to shock with its irreverence, but Burke’s work shocks with its emotional sophistication. —Ramona Martinez