Cliff Evans / After Effects

Cliff Evans’s Empyrean

I was lucky enough to see Cliff Evan's Empyrean on display at LUXE gallery in New York over the summer. I had no idea what I was getting into when I entered the gallery but after spending about 15 minutes watching the video, I left the gallery in a completely different mood than when I had walked in. I was really moved and disturbed by the work. Also I was excited about the powerful and fairly untapped resource of After Effects. The video was dense, layered, extremely well crafted, complicated, political, witty, dark, beautiful and horrible. In other words it consisted of the stuff that makes up a great work of art. He had thrown in everything but the kitchen sink and made it flow seamlessly and with intention. Please visit his site for more amazing work and video: http://www.cliffevans.net/cliffevans/home.html

Cliff Evans’s Empyrean

“Fast-moving images surround and bombard us in every part of our lives as never before,” says Pieranna Cavalchini, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, who invited Evans to live and work at the museum in 2006. “Evans takes complex, recognizable images –commercial logos, pop and religious icons, etc. – and manipulates them using rhythm, motion, and time to create complex juxtapositions that pull the viewer in. Once engaged, the viewer is obliged by the sound, the beauty, and the horror of the animated, highly focused images to look more closely and to watch as a strong political and social critique emerges. It is there, and it is vitriolic.”