In Ceirra Evans’s clear-sighted chronicling of the texture of poverty, her work faces up to difficult truths about the Appalachian county where she grew up.
One of the central preoccupations of Ceirra Evans’s current show at the Moremen Gallery, in Louisville, “It’s OK to Go Home,” is an investigation of the figurative and textural possibilities of cigarette smoke. Smoke appears in nearly all of the nine large paintings that form the heart of the show. It hangs in clouds and bubbles up in cartoonish smokestack puffs; it hovers before two young girls like a wad of cotton candy; it curls, suspended in night air—an elegant arabesque.
The painting’s title, “Those Who Can, Leave; Those Who Can’t, Teach,” evokes arguments about “brain drain” from the Appalachian region of eastern Kentucky, where Evans grew up. She hails from Bath County, in the Appalachian foothills, and now lives in Louisville, where she works as a security guard at the Speed Art Museum.
The figuration in the new paintings, though still influenced by comics and cartoons, has mostly left behind caricature for something closer to a recognizably psychological realism. This brings a new tenderness and intimacy to Evans’s work. The two largest paintings in the show illustrate crises.
In interviews, Evans has acknowledged the autobiographical nature of the new paintings, stating that every character is a relative. The exhibition is divided between two of the gallery’s rooms, and the smaller space holds the most intimate works, in which Evans reaps the greatest dividends from her new interest in subjectivity. In “Whiskey River,” titled after the song made famous by Willie Nelson, a solitary man sits up in bed, a lit cigarette in his hand, guzzling a bottle of beer.
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