EVAN WHALE

Evan Whale

The End of Sunset

November 2, 2024. On view through December 14, 2024..

Press: Pick of the Week by Jody Zellen for What’s on Los Angeles. Read the review here.

Evan Whale lives at the end of Sunset. More specifically he lives in The Forgotten Edge, a small sliver of a neighborhood where Echo Park, Angelino Heights, Chinatown and Downtown collide. It’s where the famed Sunset Boulevard comes to an unceremonious finale, and Cesar Chavez Avenue begins. It’s the intersection of all of these ‘edges’ that allowed The Forgotten Edge to remain forgotten, at least temporarily.

But in the past five years, The Forgotten Edge has been remembered by environmental regulation-dodging developers as they clear land to make way for ultra-luxury apartments. This accelerating destruction of local businesses and community gathering places has left gaping holes in the neighborhood and in the collective memory of its residents. Since 2022, Evan Whale has been rooting around in these gaping holes of earth and memory for signs, both literally and figuratively, of this transitional moment. In The End of Sunset, Whale translates these signs into new works that mark his latest exploration of the precariousness of the Southern California landscape and photographic materiality.

The sign that anchors many of the works in the show is depicted only once in Reliable Rearrangement, but appears as fragments of itself in others. In Reliable Rearrangement, we see a combination of image, sign fragments and surface alterations. The sign stands tall at the center of the image, flanked by a palm tree and a clear blue sky, both realities of the Los Angeles landscape made into fantasies by Hollywood. Whale has chemigrammed the black edges of the sign, creating a bejeweled amber glow. Black pieces of acrylic are affixed to the surface of the print, their irregular forms reminiscent of a flock of birds. The fidelity of the image roots us in reality while the abstract details ask us to question the reality they are rooted in.

The actual Reliable Sash and Door sign stood at the corner of Everett St. and Sunset Blvd. from the late 1970s through 2022. Whale unknowingly photographed it the day before it was felled and was lucky enough to be around during the sign’s demolition to collect the shattered fragments. In two works collectively titled, Sign of the Times, he arranges these bits and pieces in various compositions on cyan and periwinkle paper, colors you can see in the sky in LA on most days, depending upon the hour. The sign fragments show us a palette of color that has been created by a nearly 50-year-long exposure to the sun; the white pieces started as yellow, the pink as red. This color shifting extends into the photographic works, as Whale used expired film in an urgent attempt to capture these moments before they were demolished, giving many of the images a green, magenta, or bluish hue.

Whale continues working with the limits of film and tactile layering in Mixed-Use, a large chromogenic print of a portion of a burned-out shopping cart obscured by a light leak that fades into a magenta-tinted white sky overlaid with a chain-link pattern. On top of the chromogenic print is a piece of blue acrylic printed with a blurry apparition of palm trees against a clear blue sky, and cut to mimic the chain-link pattern underneath. With this juxtaposition, he draws our attention to the devastating effects of unaffordable housing in Los Angeles while also confronting us with a ghostly vision of idealized clear skies and palm trees like those frequently seen in the ads for the mixed-use development that will one day occupy this space.

In his book, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, cultural historian Norman Klein referred to Los Angeles as “The Most Photographed and Least Remembered City in the World.” And it's true. The cityscape of Los Angeles seems to be caught in an endless cycle of growth and destruction that leaves us with an ever-shifting landscape of the past, present and possible futures. In The End of Sunset, Whale collapses these temporal moments into stunning artworks that oscillate between fact and fiction as they ask us to consider what we remember and how we remember it.

-Juliana Paciulli

Evan Whale (b. 1987) was born in Washington, D.C, and lives and works in Los Angeles. Whale holds an MFA from the Yale School of Art (2014) and a BA from Bard College (2009). He has exhibited in group shows throughout the United States at venues such as the Denver Museum of Art, Regen Projects (LA), The Flag Arts Foundation (NY), and Jeff Bailey Gallery (NY), and internationally at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, in both the Paris Pantin and the Salzburg Villa Kast locations. Recent solo exhibitions include Soft Stories and In My Room in 2020 at Tyler Park Presents, Come and See at Actual Size (LA), in 2017, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder at 321 Gallery (NY) in 2016, which was also reviewed in The New Yorker magazine.