Artist Statement:
As a painter I’m as interested in deconstructing the medium as I am devoted to it. As a trans woman boxer increasingly unwelcome in organized sports, I bring the same deconstructive reverence to the sweet science. Donna Haraway says in The Cyborg Manifesto, “Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously.” Drawing on ambivalence, my work aims to create a discourse where painting, bodies, desire, sport, history, politics, and the everyday are all material to be taken apart and put back together. Pears and satin bed sheets are balls and boxing shorts. Bruised and blushing. A fragmented body beckons through layers of protective wrapping. Symbols, xx and xy, clash with material and language.
There is an in-betweenness to painting. It sits between image and object, signifier and signified, reference and reality, time before and time after. I’m particularly interested in making this in-between a space where painting’s materiality, semantics, and potential for metaphor can complicate desire and indulge both novel and quotidian ideas while leaving contradictions unresolved.
Biography:
Evie K Horton (b. 1990) is a painter in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA from Bard College (2019) and her BFA from Mason Gross School of The Arts (2012), she also studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, Germany (2012) in the class of Norbert Prangenberg. Her work has been shown in the United States and Germany. Currently she teaches painting at Mason Gross and has previously taught at The Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg, Austria.