Great returns

“It’s one of those things that not many people get to do in their lives, to return to a place and be able to present themselves in such an extensive way,” says Franklin Evans.

He grew up here in Reno, but after graduating from Bishop Manogue High School in 1985, hasn’t been back much. He went to Stanford, then Iowa for grad school, and has been living and working as an artist in New York ever since. But he’s returning to Reno with a massive exhibition in the Nevada Museum of Art’s Contemporary Gallery, which opens on Oct. 5.

The exhibition, titled timepaths, is an autobiographical, multi-media installation that spans the entire space of the gallery, covering nearly every inch—including the floor—with paintings, photographs, sculptures and other materials. There’s a floor sculpture that looks like a stack of books. There are manipulated photographs of past exhibitions, and trompe l’oeil paintings depicting photographs, lines of masking tape and other studio debris—photographs of paintings and paintings of photographs.

Much of the work is very personal and autobiographical. One wall has a chronological sequence of photographs from Evans’ life—snapshots of friends and family members, as well as past art installations and other exhibitions. The many references to his past, especially in the images of previous exhibitions, create a hall-of-mirrors feeling and a sense of exploring the labyrinth of someone else’s memories.

“It raises questions about memory, and memory always being present, and the shifting nature of memory,” says Evans.

There are repeated patterns of color, and manipulated photos echoing paintings that appear elsewhere in the gallery—opportunities for gallery visitors to make textual connections within the installation.

“There’s a lot of repetition,” says Evans. “You get the feeling that you’ve seen it someplace.”

The work from other exhibitions, some of which demonstrate wear and tear from audience interaction—images originally exhibited on stairs, for example—and the images of previous exhibitions create the sense that Evans is literally building upon an ongoing body of work.

His background is in painting and though he now uses photographic technology, like a large scale digital printer, he says he uses it more like a painter than a photographer: “I’m not trying to make photographs. I’m not really picky about resolutions. I’m more interested in, what does the image start doing?”

Much of the work and the installation process is site specific to the NMA’s Contemporary Gallery, responding to the shape of the walls and the locations of windows. Evans is especially excited about working with the two-story wall on the north end of the gallery

“It’s the biggest painting I’ve ever done,” he says. “I’m thinking of this as one big painting.”

But as important as the location of the gallery is to Evans’ work, for this exhibition, there’s an even more important specificity.

“I think of it often as context-specific,” he says. “So, here I’m telling the story of Franklin Evans who’s an artist who also lived here. … I was a very sheltered person growing up here. I didn’t know you could be an artist. I’m a very different person now. I mean, everyone is, if you live long enough, you’re a very different person than you were when you were 17 or 18. And Reno itself has changed a lot. I think gaming is less prevalent. It’s interesting that there’s a more diverse economy. The world has changed a lot, too.”