I held off on posting about this Globe art review until I had seen the show myself. My husband and I went yesterday, and it was as elegant as reviewer Cate McQuaid suggests.
She wrote, “Fred Eversley, the subject of a minimalist, cosmic show at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, started out in life as an aerospace engineer. His sleek sculptures, crafted and finished with precision, have the lean economy of industrial design.
“But these works don’t belong on a spacecraft — except, perhaps, to signal to an alien species the breadth of human consciousness. They are oracular. …
“In the mid 1960s, Eversley gave up his job at California’s Wyle Laboratories to become a sculptor. He was 25. By 1970, he had a solo show at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. …
“Eversley found his technique quickly, casting liquid polyester resin to first make gleaming, translucent blocks, cones, and arcs, then the wondrous parabolic circles he calls lenses. …
“Neighbors of his there included John McCracken and Larry Bell, artists in California’s Light and Space movement. …
“McCracken gave the young sculptor a can of black paint, and the work that sprang from that companionable gesture makes up this show. Eversley set aside the seductions of emeralds, wine reds, and honeyed yellows for a starker palette. These sculptures may be less intoxicating, but they are commanding, taking on life, death, and cosmology.
“The black pieces mirror, confront, and suck you in; black holes come to mind. White ones cradle and comfort. Gray ones are shrouds, sometimes parting to reveal whatever lies beyond.
The show’s installation, orchestrated by Rose curator Kim Conaty, is a marvel.
“Look through one work at an array of other ones (they are all untitled), and that frame shifts things: Suddenly, you’re not appraising objects in a gallery, but viewing another world, one both distant and intimate. The lenses act as gyres into the imagination.
“They stand on edge. In one suite of three, a nearly open gray circle sits between a black concave lens and a white one. The glossy inward slopes of the outer two slide us right to their centers, where the pigment clears.
“These small openings prompt the gaze of a spy through a keyhole, or a scientist through a scope. We’re discovering a world within. Peer through the black one, and the others resemble a lineup of planets. The wall sculpture beyond, a black-and-white arc, might be a falling star. The world within is galactic.”
More at the Globe, here. See Eversley bio here.
A bonus: we bumped into Kim (the curator) and her charming family, friends of Suzanne, Erik, and the kids. The little ones were about to get a treat at Dairy Joy in Weston, having just been good as gold at a concert in the museum. Kim described the concert on instagram: “#JennieCJones led @brandeisuniversity musicians in an improvisational reading of the score she developed in response to installation instructions by #LouiseNevelson from her 1967 exhibition @roseartmuseum.”
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