1301PE is pleased to present a new exhibition by Kirsten Everberg. In Everberg's 3rd solo exhibition at the gallery, she interrogates the nature of perception: visual, emotional, and psychological.
Everberg's work asks what do we really know of a landscape or a place, and consequently what do we know of ourselves in relation to the world. Based on Andrei Tarkovsky's masterpiece Ivan's Childhood (1962), Everberg plays with our perceptions of reality in such a way as to ultimately refute their meaning. The paintings are not only beautiful and reflective, but are above all non-representational. Despite the apparent serenity and reality of the present work, the viewer becomes lost in the painterly time and space of the work and is caught questioning the truthfulness of the representation of nature.
Everberg employs a series gestures in which elements of realism mix with relative abstraction. These paintings do not stress the permanence of space, rather its endless possibilities. Through the handling of paint and the proximity between abstraction and figuration, Everberg creates a distance between issues of perception and conception. What results from this depiction is an embodiment of the works concern, questions regarding the perception of reality through an alternate reality. She has experimented, meshed, and challenged the perceptions of varied approaches, expressing life's temporality and humanity's struggle with memory and sense of place.
Since 2003 each exhibition has brought a new aspect of the work to life, as seen in Russell Ferguson's Undiscovered Country at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles in 2004 and in Everberg's first major one-person museum exhibition at Le Consortium, Dijon in 2005. Ferguson says that, "Everberg's thick enamel paint simultaneously seduces and repels the viewer as it seals the image of the place. The shiny paint echoes the glittering surfaces. It fixes and preserves them, as if in amber, yet at the same time its fluidity suggests that the whole scene could be at the point of melting away forever."
Everberg has been included in exhibitions in several prestigious institutions including the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver BC, Canada; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Le Consortium, Dijon, France; and Musee Des Beaux-Arts, Nancy, France.
