Perivoli – Equivocation
Solo Exhibition & Residency: Rafael Pérez Evans
Nov 16th - Dec 21st 2024
Thurs – Sat. 4pm – 8pm or by appointment
Site-specific installation, live pomegranate trees, watering system, mirrors, found objects.
In Perivoli – Equivocation, Rafael Pérez Evans stages a farewell to the gallery’s previous life as a clothing shop. The remaining mirrors that once lined the shop’s walls and basement have been peeled from the walls and scattered throughout the space, creating a makeshift, oversized “changing room” for all to peek into. These mirrors return to work one last time, reflecting fragments of ornate, “outdated” objects salvaged from nearby flats undergoing rapid renovation. Each item, remnants of older generations’ homes, captures a fleeting glimpse of itself before being consigned to abandonment in this gentrifying neighborhood.
“Perivoli” is the Greek word for “orchard” or “enclosure.” Above, ten pomegranate trees have been uprooted and suspended from the ceiling, creating an orchard with an irrigation system. Their leaves are changing to yellow with the autumn season, whilst their full fruits remain unpicked, hanging high and dangling out of reach. Each day, as the trees are watered, a gentle drip marks the gallery in a quiet protest. Through these discarded ornamented furnishings and out of reach fruits, Pérez Evans unearths some remnants of Southern Mediterranean cultures under relentless pressure to conform to shifting material, epistemic, and financial currents.
Evans reimagines institutions and art spaces as temporary parking lots, where charged histories, materials, and sentiments in flux are momentarily parked and reconfigured. Objects are suspended, dumped and spilled, allowing the undercommons—those turned to surplus—to surface briefly before being swept back into an (insatiable?) market that seldom allows anything to rest.
Rafael Pérez Evans is a Spanish-Welsh artist currently pursuing a PhD with an Arts and Humanities Scholarship at The Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University, where he explores human rewilding through the lenses of radical artists, working-class activism, crip & queer theory and how they can untame the self. He holds an MFA and BA from Goldsmiths University and has received a Fellowship at the Henry Moore Institute and Leeds Beckett University.
Recent exhibitions include CAAC Museum, ES (2024); Workplace, UK (2024); Queer Circle, UK (2023); T.E.A Museum, ES (2022); Henry Moore Institute, UK (2021); C3A Museum, ES (2020); South London Gallery, UK (2020); Leeds Art Gallery, UK (2019); Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, TW (2019); Matadero, ES (2018); Nogueras Blanchard Gallery, ES (2017); and Despina, BR (2015). Recent artist talks include the Henry Moore Institute, UK; Goldsmiths MFA, UK; AA: Architectural Association, UK and the University of Virginia, USA. Recent teaching engagements include Goldsmiths MFA, the Royal Academy Schools, the Royal College of Art, Central Saint Martins, and Leeds University, UK.
Cynefin
Group Exhibition
July 12th – August 9th. 2024
Open Thurs - Sat 4pm-8pm or by Appointment.
Curated by Neal Rock
Gordon Cheung, Michael Freeman, Maria Georgoula, Virginia Gibson, Giorgos Kontis, Peter Lamb, Helen O’Leary, Eftihis Patsourakis,
Vibha Vijay.
Cynefin is a Welsh word that does not have an exact equivalent in the English language. Often translated as habitat, the word has a deeper, more nuanced meaning that describes a place of existential belonging, a synchronicity between peoples and their relationship to home and cultural history.
This word names an inaugural group exhibition and opening of a new gallery and residency program in Athens, Greece. It marks the expansion of the Freeman Artist Residency program, founded by Welsh visual artist Neal Rock, in Charlottesville, Virginia (2020). Gibson. The artists in this exhibition have led peripatetic lives in their pursuit of cynefin. Having often left their countries and communities of birth, many have created a foundation for a sense of belonging that crosses and renegotiates national, ideological and political boundaries.
Co-sponsored by a Faculty Research Grant for the Arts from the Office of the Provost & the Vice Provost of the Arts
University of Virginia. USA