Chris Evans
Chris Evans' work often evolves through conversation with people from diverse walks of life, selected in relation to their public life or symbolic role, for example, the directors of a leading champagne house, a former member of the British Constructivists, the CEO of a Texas pharmaceutical company, a selection of elderly Italian politicians, an anonymous philanthropist etc.
Sculptures, letters, drawings, film scripts and unwieldy social situations created as a result of this, are indexes of a larger structure through which Evans deliberately confuses the roles of artist and patron, author and muse. Likewise his role in this is contradictory: moving between artistic freedom and social responsibility, individuality and the collective, sovereignty and involvement. He is interested in the notion of the monument and its discontent and the hidden relations behind the fruition of a cultural object for public use – for example, how beliefs, social status and ideological positions are negotiated in the work of art – and how these might be questioned through the invention of absurd alternative procedures to produce sculpture.
Through a desire to make art that has at it outset political motivation - finding fault lines in the politicisation of culture - its utilitarian function as social ameliorative or harbinger of urban regeneration - Evans is intent on maintaining its connection with personal, poetic or imaginative investigation.