{"id":15206,"date":"2021-02-25T17:20:12","date_gmt":"2021-02-25T17:20:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=15206"},"modified":"2021-05-18T20:48:42","modified_gmt":"2021-05-18T20:48:42","slug":"the-object-and-you-fred-eversley-in-conversation-with-jenny-dally","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=15206","title":{"rendered":"The Object and You: Fred Eversley in Conversation with Jenny Dally"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Fred<\/a>
Fred Eversley in his Venice Beach studio, 2018\n(photograph by Elon Schoenholz; photograph provided by David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Fred Eversley initially conceived of his sculpture as \u201ckinetic art without using kinetic elements.\u201d1<\/a><\/sup> Within seconds of encountering one of his cast-resin or polyester sculptures, the object takes hold of the visitor’s movement, guiding their eyes and body around the work with a visually alluring high sheen that casts a distorting lens on the environment. Eversley has produced such sculptures since the beginning of his career. Diverse in color and scale, they are unified by glossy surfaces and a complex, technical process\u2014involving custom-designed tools and extensive polishing\u2014that serves as a testament to his early scientific training. Born in Brooklyn in 1941, Eversley studied as an engineer at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and moved to Southern California in the early 1960s to work as a senior project engineer at Wyle Laboratories, where he developed testing facilities for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.2<\/a><\/sup> He began his career in the art world by assisting his Venice Beach neighbors in the execution of technically challenging projects; he then went on to produce work in his own right in the late 1960s and soon became known as a central figure of the Light and Space movement. His sculptures exemplify the group\u2019s interest in the atmospheric effects of their coastal environment, but they are distinguished by Eversley\u2019s preoccupation with physical energy as a common characteristic of all humanity. Throughout his career, Eversley has sought to use energy as a central force in his work, with the hope of appealing to a universal audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Speaking by phone on April 26 and June 10, 2019, Eversley and I talked about his path to becoming an artist, the production of his work, and his ongoing practice of fifty-plus years. Our wide-ranging exchange has been edited for length and clarity, with some of Eversley\u2019s responses reorganized to group similar themes; any text in brackets has been added for clarity. The below otherwise follows the progression of our conversation as it took place. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014Jenny Dally<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jenny Dally: <\/strong>Your training is in engineering, you had considered medical school, and your professional background is in the aerospace industry. Could you tell me about how you came to be an artist, and specifically a sculptor?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fred Eversley: <\/strong>Basically, I worked for a company called Wyle Laboratories as an engineer in El Segundo, California, and while I was there I was very involved in the local art community because we [various Light and Space artists and the artistic community of Venice Beach generally] all lived in Venice together. And while I was an engineer, I met a young artist that I fell in love with, and I had an accident. I broke my thigh very badly and they put me on crutches for almost a year. And I was helping my girlfriend, Nancy, make her sculpture. She was an MFA student at UCLA and I used the opportunity\u2014I was getting a disability payment from the state\u2014to essentially experiment with making art myself, and that\u2019s how I got started making art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At first, the art was photographs encapsulated in plastic. I\u2019d been a photographer for years, an amateur photographer, and so I started encapsulating photographs in plastic, which led to my work in polyester. I was making many layers of plastic to figure out how to get photographs to be flat in the plastic, and I started these experiments as little multilayer rectangles with plastic, which became interesting to me. Robert Rauschenberg came over and really loved my little pieces of sculpture and encouraged me a lot. And my good friend John Altoon\u2014he lived three doors down the street from the studio I was sharing with Charlie Mattox\u2014encouraged me to forget my photographs and just deal with plastic because he thought it was more interesting. So I just started making experiments, mostly making multilayered, multicolored plastic. And I got into a few local shows at a few local museums, and Rauschenberg came over and said, \u201cForget trying to get a gallery in LA; go straight to New York, the LA scene is just too difficult.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So in February 1968 or \u201969, I came to New York with an attach\u00e9 case, around fifteen pieces, full of these little pieces of multilayered, multicolored polyester, and I took Rauschenberg\u2019s advice. I met Betty Parsons first, because that\u2019s the gallery he started in. And Betty said, \u201cThis is not the kind of work that I show but I love it, I really love them,\u201d and she bought a couple little pieces from me. And from there, I went to see [Leo] Castelli and I was intercepted by his gallery manager, who said, \u201cYou have to show them to me before you can show them to Castelli.\u201d I showed them to him, he loved them, but said that Castelli wouldn\u2019t be interested in showing me. I saw Castelli and he loved the pieces, gave me a lot of encouragement, but didn\u2019t offer to show them. And on the way out of the gallery, the first gentleman that looked at the sculptures said, \u201cI\u2019m opening a gallery in downtown Manhattan in December, please come see me, my name is Ivan Karp.\u201d He gave me a card and I walked out of there feeling like a thousand bucks. I walked down Madison Avenue. There was a gallery called Richard Feigen, and I went up to see him, he loved them also and took one piece on consignment and put it in his display case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then I was on my way to see Marian Goodman, who had a little gallery called Multiples, and before I got there I came to the Whitney Museum. I remembered that an old friend of mine had become a curator at the Whitney, so I went to the phone at the desk in the lobby and called up to her and she invited me to come upstairs and see her. We hadn\u2019t seen each other in probably six years, and I said \u201cWell, I\u2019m making sculptures.\u201d She said, \u201cYou what?\u201d I said, \u201cI\u2019m making sculpture.\u201d She knew I was an engineer, and she says, \u201cLet me see them.\u201d And so I pulled out my little attach\u00e9 case, she loved them, and she picked up her telephone and basically got the entire senior staff into her office to look at my little sculptures. She called me the next day and she said, \u201cFred, how would you like to have a show at the Whitney in June?\u201d And I thought she was kidding, because Marcia [Tucker] was a big kidder, and I didn\u2019t do anything. I went back to sleep and she called at two o\u2019clock in the afternoon. She says, \u201cFred, where the hell are you? You know, the whole senior staff is just waiting to meet you.\u201d I said, \u201cMarcia, you\u2019re not serious\u201d\u2014she said, \u201cYes!\u201d And so I jumped into the shower, grabbed my attach\u00e9 case, and ran up to the Whitney and it was late, it was after five o\u2019clock. But the staff was all assembled in the boardroom and was pissed off at me for making them stay late, but they looked at my little sculptures and they discussed. They said, \u201cDo you have any larger sculptures in California?\u201d And I said, \u201cYes,\u201d which was a lie\u2014I didn\u2019t. I had experimented with big sculptures, I had one big piece that was in a show called Plastic Presence<\/em> at the Jewish Museum\u2014that\u2019s now in the collection of the Milwaukee Art Museum\u2014the previous year. So I knew I could do big sculptures, and I was offered a show and I went back to California and started working like hell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that\u2019s how I got started. Six months later I had my show at Ivan Karp [OK Harris], and then a show in Chicago at Phyllis Kind, concurrent with my show at the Whitney; they both happened one week apart in June of 1970. Yeah, that\u2019s how I got started\u2014it came out of nowhere. It came out of Rauschenberg stopping by the studio and Marcia at the Whitney. So one thing happened after another over six months, basically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dally: <\/strong>I imagine you walking through New York in one afternoon and introducing the whole New York art scene to your work and your practice in one fell swoop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eversley: <\/strong>I think it was something like February 7 that I went to Betty Parsons, and I think I had my meeting at the Whitney around February 8, and I immediately went back to California the same night. And worked my ass off and produced two shows of work, one for the Whitney and one for Phyllis Kind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dally:<\/strong> You talk about working like hell when you got back to California, and I\u2019m certain your work is very labor intensive to produce. Could you walk me through the process of making one of your cast-resin or polyester pieces?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eversley: <\/strong>Right. I had managed to find one assistant who helped me polish, so I cast and polished and this other assistant just polished. And we managed to get two shows together\u2014more than two shows, because I was also in a group show at Pace, called The Last California Show <\/em>[A Decade of California Color<\/a><\/em>]\u2014I had three pieces in that show. So, I mean, it was the Whitney show, the Pace show, the Phyllis Kind show, and the OK Harris show, all in six months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Whitney show and the Phyllis Kind show were pieces that we cast by spinning\u2014casting multilayered, multicolored plastic into cylindrical forms, using a lathe to spin a large cylinder about the horizontal axis. For the OK Harris show, I switched from spinning them on the horizontal axis to spinning them on the vertical axis, which produced a parabolic shape as opposed to a cylindrical shape that I then cut.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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