Projects & exhibitions

Gambrels, Eves and Beams

CCHHUURRCCHH Gallery, Mahone Bay, NS | October 2023

Curated by Andrew Cairns, Hosted by Hannah Epstein

This exhibition consists of observational paintings of farm buildings and infrastructure around my family's decommissioned farm. These paintings are created in a way that pulls from the colours and graphic nature of early science fiction and horror film posters. The exhibition explores tropes of rural farm spaces found in these genres of fiction, heightening these real images to create mysterious and ominous implications of a narrative based on colour and contrast. The title of the exhibition refers to Gambrels (the type of roof found on one of these barns) Eves, a play on words meaning evening and the eaves of a building, and Beams, both the structural beams of a building and the beams of light that come from farm machinery and buildings while working at night.

Site/Scene

The Hilda Woolnough Gallery, Charlottetown, PE | 2023
with Lisa Theriault & Damien Worth

Site/Scene is an exhibition of recent work by Evan Furness, Lisa Theriault, and Damien Worth exploring their relationship to living in rural Epekwitk/Prince Edward Island. These artists work across disciplines, using drawing, video, sculpture, and installation to interpret both their past experiences and their speculations about the future. Worth’s sculptural vignettes examine rural infrastructure through playful use of space and dialogues between mundane objects. Theriault's meticulous and detailed drawings build a narrative around a lone high-rise building as it is overtaken by a collapsing environment. Furness’s paintings and videos reflect on farm spaces in relation to tropes found in their depictions in horror sci fi and dystopian fiction.

In addition to the works created independently, the meetings held in preparation for this exhibition lead to the creation of a collaborative installation stemming from their collective experience of Hurricane Fiona. The structure is assembled from building material and other objects found around the artists homes and includes several videos also created through collaboration by the artists.

Read a review written by Norah Pendergast for Billie Magazine here: https://billiemag.ca/site-scene/

Certain Conditions

Video installation with t-shirt, bedsheets, wood, air duct vents, storage tote lid, and weather controlled digital synthesizers & video sequencer | 2022-Ongoing

Presented at:
Seasons Change, Glenaladale Schoolhouse gallery, Radiant Rural Halls, Tracadie, PE 2023 [Winter Version]
Art in the Open, Charlottetown PE 2022 [Summer Version]

Certain Conditions is a multi-media installation exploring the weather’s impact on routine. The work consists of a video collage controlled by the current weather of myself doing household chores layered over images of the sky that match the current weather. The video is projected onto a handmade screen made with cut up blue shirts and a bed sheet hung on a clothesline attached to a wooden base which functions as a bench resembling raised bed planters. The video is controlled by a program I created in MAX 8 which uses data collected from various weather stations in the region to generate both the musical score and edit of the collages. Any location can be put in and I will use the location where the work is presented. Various data points such as wind speed, temperature and precipitation all affect the final video. The decisions made around how the music and visuals would respond to the data are all based on established literary and cinematic tropes associated with weather as a storytelling device. For example, a rainy day plays music on a minor scale to indicate a sadder mood.

Each video is dubbed with a foley process where I have removed the original sounds and dubbed them over with instruments that reflect the sound’s original timbre. Forks clinking become cymbals hit by drum sticks. The chugging of a lawn mower is mimicked by distorted, tremolo picked guitar strings. Multiple videos play at a time and are designed to loop until triggered at random by the program to change. The weather controls the pace and urgency with which they are done, generating ever evolving rhythms that drift between discernable beats and cacophonous noise. The rhythms act as both anchors of stability and moments of disorganization, mimicking how easy it can be to fall in and out of routines.

The artist would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts for their support of this project through a Research and Creation Grant received in 2021.

This love is new but it’s projections

The Gallery at the Guild in collaboration with this town is small | 2020

with Jordan Beaulieu

An exhibition of recent video and installation works by Jordan Beaulieu and Evan Furness exploring the transference of emotions to objects, images, spaces, and places.

For Rona

salle sans souse at gallerie sans nom | January - March 2018

For Rona was my first solo exhibition. It is about building a space through narrative using the location of an old house and broken down school bus in the woods as its setting. The works construct a story of fiction and truth, inviting the viewer to consider the relationship that memory builds with place, and the acts that have occurred there.