Eve Fowler
Artist Statement
My creative practice hinges on a form of collaboration that has bearing witness at its core. This is manifested through a decades-long art practice and through ongoing work with fellow artists, filmmakers, writers, and curators under the rubric of the exhibition project which I organize called Artist Curated Projects. Over the last ten years, I have sustained an engagement with the creative work of Gertrude Stein that has taken the form of billboards, posters, prints, paintings, film, and installations employing materials such as vinyl, neon, and collage. At the core of what I do is the intimacy of collaboration. Everything is with and for—bearing witness cannot happen alone. My works queer the archive and resist patriarchal notions of insular subjectivity, ushering in new and feminist forms of being and being with each other.
- December 2021
Biography
Eve Fowler is an interdisciplinary artist whose work investigates the problems, possibilities, and ethics of what it means to bear witness to the work, body, and life of another. Whether working through a camera’s lens or in paint, installation, sound, or public space, her practice moves in and with the margins, towards what has been unrepresented, ignored, or struck from the record.
These Sounds Fall Into My Mind, her solo exhibition at Morán Morán, Los Angeles, CA (2019), explored the nature of artistic lineage, lingering upon phrases drawn from texts by Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein in filmic collages and monochromatic paintings. In the voiceover to a video work—from which the title of the exhibition was taken—Fowler can be heard rejecting the influence of these authors, even as she quotes again from their writings, demonstrating that acts of refusal can be another mode of responding positively to a creative heritage.
Fowler has also had solo exhibitions at Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, Scotland, United Kingdom (2018) and PARTICIPANT INC, New York, NY (2016). Her work is in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
She has published two books that incorporate photography, text, and collage: Anyone Telling Anything Is Telling That Thing (Printed Matter, 2013) and Hustlers (Capricious Publishing, 2014).
Fowler is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2021); the David and Roberta Logie Fellowship at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2018-2019); an Art Matters Foundation Award (2017); and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant (2016).
Fowler organizes exhibitions at Artist Curated Projects. She holds a B.F.A. from Temple University and an M.F.A. from Yale University School of Art.
