TrendCrib // Evan Hecox | Dark Island @ Joshua Liner

Evan Hecox | Dark Island @ Joshua Liner

Joshua Liner Gallery recently presented Dark Island, an exhibition of new mixed-media works by the Denver-based artist Evan Hecox.

Evan Hecox has a roving traveler’s eye—it is the gateway to his art. His passion for exploring unfamiliar cities has taken him to London, Mexico City, and Hanoi. With vintage Polaroid camera in hand, he scours the urban landscape, looking, lingering, absorbing, and editing. The images he captures are not documentary records, per se, but rather impressions of cities left behind in his memory. They set the stage for a stimulating dialogue with personal experience that crosses between different artmaking media and disciplines.

Dark Island—a suite of acrylic and gouache works on vintage newspaper—is inspired by Hecox’s recent hikes across lower Manhattan and west Brooklyn in New York City. As in earlier series inspired by specific locales, the artist focuses here on telling urban fragments: a building façade, rooftop, isolated alleyway, waterfront, or elevated train trellis. Working precisely from photographs, he uses a highly refined process to subtract certain elements, laying down a skeletal vestige of a remembered setting that is then reimagined (or “amplified”) with painterly techniques. Though photography is an early stage in his artmaking practice and employed only as a reference, Hecox relishes the use of his near-obsolete cameras and film, noting, “I like to have a high level of materials and artistry run through the whole process.”