Exhibition Review of Evan Summer’s Art (by Ji Kim)

The exhibition of Evan Summer’s art world, developed throughout forty years, was fascinating enough to blow me away in many ways. The media he utilized, such as collagraphy, etching, drypoint, engraving and lithography, was new to me in that I have not had an opportunity to work with them yet. However, the one that made me even far amazed was his ability to infuse mysterious and somewhat ominous atmospheric effect to his meticulous lines and geometric shapes. One of his early collagraph works, A Stillness in the Air, was a good example, showing his interest in portraying the interplay of hard-edged shapes and organic textures. It was clear that the process of making a collagraph must have led him to investigate a collage in his later works. In his collage work, Darkening Sky, Evan Summer put several layers of paper, board, and colors of pastel on aluminum as if he utilized multiple layers to produce different textures for his collagraph.

His amazing craftsmanship and keen observation was another factor which made his art works unique among other contemporary landscape art. It might sound ironical at first, but the existence of the artist could be felt obviously in his seemingly impersonal landscape prints. I felt both excitement and gloominess from his mysterious scenery, which depicts the abstract architectural forms at foreground as opposed to the realistic organic forms in the background. I contemplated the duality in Summer’s art works and asked myself how the artist was able to achieve a balance between two opposing features of the man-made and the nature. I believe that it was his genius use of black fine lines which merged different visual languages into one voice. These directional lines also generated the various kinds of emotions from the viewer. As Evan Summer himself explained at an opening day of the exhibition, his entirely hand-made prints helped him to be connected with the audience, giving the cold landscape art works a new life.

The Evan Summer’s exhibition made me to think about what makes it a good art. Some narrow-sighted people might regard the beauty as a composition with a full array of pleasing elements. Evan Summer’s works, however, visually argued that the true beauty can exist in the complex array of ugly, uncomfortable and beautiful elements altogether. In addition to its value of looking at the contemporary art, the show also gave me an opportunity to think about the spirit of an artist. As many artists do, Summer explored many new media as he developed his art philosophy. He never stopped to utilize new media, invent techniques, and develop his idea. Summer also kindly urged the students to look at the past sketches when they get stuck. The art works of Evan Summer, along with his speech, was refreshing for me in that I looked closely at the contemporary art works outside of the campus and got an advice from one of the successful artists today.