Fred Eversley Brings Cosmic Energy to New Orange County Museum of Art
Energy, from the wind whispering in your ear to the sun grazing your thigh, has always been a source of curiosity for sculptor Fred Eversley. "Without energy, none of this exists," he said in a video produced by the Getty. Now 81, the artist has been refining his interest in light, space, movement and perception over the last 55 years, his creative vision steadfast and exacting. Eversley is known for his lens-like sculptures, diaphanous orbs with concave surfaces that are created and shaped through centrifugal force. Usually arranged on white pedestals, they look like captured planets and stars, drops of astral matter that have fallen from the universe. He describes these signature sculptures as parabolic forms. The shape holds deep meaning for the artist. "The parabola happens to be the only mathematic shape that concentrates all forms of known energy to the same single focal point," he explained in a profile of his career.
U-shaped and mirror-symmetrical, his parabolas underline the links between the cosmic and the scientific, inviting viewers to contemplate the complex (physical, social, divine) energies that shape life on Earth. "He is an amazing combination of this methodical, research-based scientist who's also an artist at heart," says Courtenay Finn, the chief curator at Orange County Museum of Art, on a phone call with KCET Artbound. She is organizing "Fred Eversley: Reflecting Back (the World)," one of the inaugural exhibitions at the museum's new location at the Segerstrom Center of the Arts, a performing arts complex in Costa Mesa. Originally conceived by former senior curator Cassandra Coblentz, the show coincides with the October 8th grand opening of OCMA's new building, an undulating terracotta facade designed by Thom Mayne and Partner-in-Charge Brandon Welling of Morphosis Studio. Running through January 2, 2023, the show will take visitors on a journey through Eversley's practice, zooming in on his explorations of material and color via his trove of parabolic lenses.
Finn explains that the genesis of the show grew from a desire "to look backwards while looking forward." Eversley has a long relationship with OCMA, formerly known as the Newport Harbor Art Museum and the Balboa Pavilion Gallery. Founded in 1962 by 13 women, the museum has moved three times over the years, and Eversley has been involved in an exhibition at every location, including his pivotal solo show in 1976. "He was hitting his stride [at this time], and you could see it in the development of his craft," Finn explained. That show led to the museum acquiring an opaque black lens made that same year. When the curatorial team was thinking of exhibitions to mark this new phase of OCMA, Eversley popped up as an obvious choice, an artist who has been a crucial presence in the museum's history, mirroring its own evolution. Finn adds, "It seems really fitting for him to be part of the inaugural show, with his long standing relationship with the museum. It's exciting to think about an artist who is still working today. He's still a voice of what's happening right now."
Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Eversley was drawn to science from an early age. He recalls tinkering in the basement of his parents' house — his mother was a schoolteacher, and his father was a notable engineer who ran a successful construction business —for hours on end, creating his own DIY science experiments using items like pie pans and a phonograph table. He studied electrical engineering at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, graduating in 1963. He departed for Los Angeles a year later, after securing a position as an aerospace engineer at Wyle Laboratories in El Segundo. During the day, he worked on special projects for NASA, including the Gemini and Apollo programs. At night, he immersed himself in the Venice Beach creative community, the neighborhood he ended up settling in. (He lived in Venice for 50 years, until rising rents forced him and his wife, architect Maria Larsson, to move to New York in 2019). He began spending time with his neighbors: John Altoon, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, John McCracken and James Turrell.
Most of these artists, along with Mary Corse and Helen Pashgian, are considered pioneers of the Light and Space movement, an informal affiliation of Los Angeles-based artists working in the '60s and '70s. Light and Space artists crafted immersive visual experiences concerned with perceptual phenomena. Described by art critics as a West Coast reaction to the austerity of New York Minimalism, Light and Space embraced Californian aesthetics, drawing inspiration from the way the sun would hit "waxed surfboards and gleaming automobiles," as ArtSpace writes. Their materials — neon, glass, fluorescent lights — also expressed the influence of the nearby aerospace industries, and some artists often collaborated with scientists to bring their creations to life. Thanks to his engineering background, people like Bell and Charles Mattox called on Eversley for technical help.
In 1967, Eversley was in a severe car accident that left him on crutches for 13 months. When Mattox offered him a free place to stay in exchange for assisting in his studio, Eversley quit Wyle Labs and shifted his attention to full-time artmaking. His labor-intensive technique has not changed since his first experiments with centrifugal force. Using a modified pottery wheel that allows him to control the speed, Eversley pours liquid plastic mixed with color pigments into molds, spinning his castings until he creates the specific parabolic shape he wants. From there, the soapy sculpture is sanded and polished to a glisten. His first lenses were three-color studies, exploring the inexhaustible variations of amber, blue and violet. He expanded to other colors in 1972 after McCracken gave him his can of black pigment. And unlike the enormous scale of works by Bell or Turrell, Eversley's sculptures are usually under 20 inches and up to 7 inches deep, though he has dabbled in larger works, including 35-foot-tall sculpture installed at the Miami International Airport and a new 7-foot-tall work made for the OCMA show.
In "Untitled (parabolic lens)" ([969] 2018), also featured in the show, a solar-hued ball of energy is hugged by a thick ring of black. From afar, the lens looks like a reverse annular eclipse. As you move closer, the colors bend and distort as the surface refracts the images of nearby sculptures and figures. "I'm all about universality," Eversley said in a recent interview, "I don't like art that you have to know art history to appreciate." In contrast, his art pulls viewers into a quixotic trance, marveling at the ways energy can shift our perception of ourselves and others. In addition to his horizontal and vertical lenses, "Reflecting Back" highlights Eversley's forays into bronze and laminated acrylic. Installed in the boomerang-shaped Mezzanine gallery, the layout will "weave visitors through time and color," Finn explained, with two different entry points that allow for different readings of the show. Working with Eversley and Larsson on the layout, Finn uses words like constellations, galaxy and cosmos to describe the trio's thinking behind the order of sculptures. Eversley's work opens us up to the quiet phenomena coursing through our natural world. "His lenses remind us how much our perception can be shifted or heightened. Something that seems ordinary can be extraordinary, if we look at it in a new way," Finn said.
