Critical MAS: Olivia Bates on Darryl Evans’ “Water Rights”

Written by Olivia Bates

It was unusually humid, not particularly hot, but damn humid the day I went to the Mayor’s Art Show. I was glad to descend the stairs and pass an hour in the cool basement of the Hult Center. It was not crowded that afternoon, just me and the gallery monitor and the art – pieces of varied sizes and mediums. I walked around this art-scape twice tempted, as usual, to touch the art. I especially wanted to pet the upholstered “taxidermy” cat and put on the wooden circle platform shoes.  

As I moved around, I found myself returning to stare at a large painting near the entrance. The under-most layer was black, like oil, and stood out against the white gallery walls. Littered and layered over the oily depths were white lines; they gathered to form abstract shapes like reverse shadows. The white paint looked raked, spread like cold butter on toast, over the dark background. The painting struck me as embodying a series of polarities – the fractured lines like both images from an inkjet printer running out of ink and primitive cave drawings – the shapes themselves both abstract and ghostly figurative. 

I stood in front of the painting as though in front of a magical mirror that reflects both past and present. It reminded me of so many things, I kept looking for want of more associations: city lights on the water at night, silhouette portraits, a seismograph, a beautiful code I couldn’t quite understand but that was certainly recording some kind of crisis. Where there was color, it was muted, and I was intrigued. I was struck that while the painting moved, the lines dancing to create shapes, it moved within the limits of its own frame. It was strangely contained, despite the range of associations it had brought to me. 

When I had wondered enough about this painting that I desperately wanted to run my fingernails over hoping that the many lines were raised, I looked to the artist statement. This is a piece about water, about a lack of water. A problem that, like the painting, feels archaic and brand new, uniquely exposed by this moment in American history. One feels the pressure of this crisis, looking at Darryl Evans’ painting, with or without its specific story.  

To learn more about the writing in the Critical MAS series, go to Critical MAS: Introduction.