Exhibit explores city mythology

One must imagine Daniel Evans as a fantasist. If the Sturgeon County artist were ever to become a civil engineer then he would certainly create living spaces like no one has ever seen before.

Evans has just put the finishing touches on his latest exhibit, Invisible Cities. It's also his first to come to the Art Gallery of St. Albert, where he used to work only a few years ago. His last show was at Latitude 53 back in 2011. There, he recreated his childhood playhouse as homage to his grandfather. Through an apparatus of strings, the whole structure was lifted above the ground. He made them to float because even the places that were real in the past have an intangible and ethereal quality in the present.

Now, the graphic novelist/draughtsman/printmaker/sculptor has a series of sketches, some experimental pieces, and also a kind of maquette model to give a three-dimensional visualization of the cityscapes in his images. According to the artist himself, they are all extrapolations of the mythologies of cities around the world.

"I was working on the idea of mythmaking in urban spaces," he said, referring to his graduate studies at the North Wales School of Art and Design.

"I was studying design, looking at sequential narrative … things like film storyboards and graphic novels. A lot of what I was interested in doing was exploring different mythologies but also the process of how mythologies are formed and how the process of mythmaking continues in contemporary society."

There are three themes to this body of work: the idea of mythical cities themselves, the mythic aura evoked by some notable world cities because of their historical significance, and the subjective experience of urban space.

"Contemporary societies do create mythologies that are informed by the ways people in the societies live," he said, later adding, "Any two people in a given urban space will construct it differently based on how they interact with it, what they choose to filter out, the areas that they choose to explore. Every individual moving through an urban space constructs a personalized vision of it."

Intricate designs

Evans' exhibit provides a series of intricate designs of cityscapes. They are strikingly reminiscent of some of his images from his Threshold books, but they also look like the setting of an 18th century Dickens story mashed with Terry Gilliam's abstract and absurdist visions set within an imaginative world where streets and buildings can bend up and fold within themselves.

The Belly of the Whale, for instance, looks like a city has been put into a bag and all of the buildings and streets have smashed into a collection at the bottom of it.

Another, The Garden of Forking Paths, has a panorama of a street scene, seemingly set in Britain because of the architecture but with a distinctive shantytown esthetic. Multiple avenues head off into the distance. One can't help but wonder that, in this world, opening one door to a small house might lead to an infinity of space inside. How anyone could exist there is a matter of conjecture. Of course, none of these works contain images of people anyway, but that's beside the point. The city is the thing of exploration here.

The maquette model, Convergence and Assimilation, is a three-dimensional rendering of a sample cityscape. It should be thought of as more of a countryside with its barn, grain elevator, steeple and woodsheds, all made out of cardstock.

Those who have followed Evans' work might also remember the piano that he created for StArts Fest back in September. It comes with a similar cityscape, one that extends down the side of the upright instrument. That creation is now on display at the Citadel Theatre in downtown Edmonton.

These pieces in Invisible Cities are complemented by some experimental works. Evans calls them street maps of fictional cities that have been engraved into sheets of acrylic, the lines of which are then rubbed with charcoal for emphasis. A hyperconcentrated salt solution is poured over top. After the solution evaporates, the salt crystallizes, leaving an amorphous splot with some sections of intense cubic designs over Chinese ink splatters.

"It started as an attempt to integrate the really tight control that I get with printmaking and I control every single parameter with an element that I can't control which is like organic growth. I quite like this bit that you can control very precisely and the bit that you can't."

They must be seen for a proper inspection.

In some of these pieces, Evans avoids the engraving entirely to let the crystallization happen on its own accord. The ink also sometimes doesn't get used.

Serious play

As viewers, we are left to wonder whether the artist is attempting a serious exploration of a subject – he has certainly spent enough time working with the concept and uses enough academic language to convince us – or is he simply playing around to develop some unreal lands that demand our attention?

"Can't it be both?" Evans says, slyly. "I think that play is a very serious activity. I think with the amount of effort I've invested in it, it had better be a serious exploration but that doesn't mean that it can't have elements of enjoyment in it as well."

As an added feature of interest to the show, attendees are encouraged to use their mobile phones and use a QR Code scanner to get started.

Fans of Evans' graphic books (the Threshold series or Galleria) will recognize the British mystery novel feel to his language: "The alley ahead of her blossomed into a lattice of intersecting streets, unfolding in impossible directions," starts the text.

There could be no more proper introduction into this world that, depending on your point of view, accordions outward or contracts into itself.