Eve Fowler Days of 2024

Morán Morán is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Eve Fowler. Titled Days of 2024, Fowler’s second solo exhibition with the gallery comprises two distinct yet connected bodies of work, including painting and video installation. The exhibition expands on Fowler’s ongoing concerns–visibility, language, and cultural biases as they relate to gender politics and queerness.

The show’s title references a poem by James Merrill, Days of 1964. Sixty years later, similarly scanning her days, her surroundings, how she spends her time, Fowler writes her own poem as the basis for a suite of works. In her writing, Fowler reflects on a quote she once heard attributed to Merrill: that he had let the closet disintegrate around him—assuming the passive act of watching others come out as queer until it was normalized. Fowler reconsiders this language to suggest that Merrill might have actually stood in one place while the closet collapsed around him, implying more forceful and pressurized conditions. The Closet Collapsing (2024) is a meditative prose poem (and a painting in the exhibition), from which Fowler composes three more paintings, like pages, like illuminated manuscripts on cream-colored canvas with large, dropped-capital letters in bold colors.

A second talisman informs Fowler’s Days of 2024: a small figurative watercolor by Math Bass. Fowler has owned it for years. It’s the sign of a longstanding friendship, of artists who have seen each other weather change in art, ideas, and their lives. Now, summoning the painting into words, Fowler writes a second poem about its imagined protagonist: She reaches in and pulls out a yellow sun, a black mask. The sun is inside her already…Then, she unmakes her own words again, dissecting sentences, this time painting solitary letterforms and poem fragments that hover and overlap across large compositions. An ambiguous femaleness, or female-like form, emerges from the abstract shapes and negative spaces. The poem again becomes three paintings that are, in turn, layered back onto the poem printed on the wall as a long phrase, buttressing against the gallery’s architecture.

– Lauren Mackler

The final element of this exhibition is Labor (2023)–a nine-channel video installation filmed by Eve Fowler, Mariah Garnett, and Lucas Michael; edited by Rhys Ernst; and color corrected by Olivia Ambrosia Taussig-Rees; that is comprised of twenty videos presented on nine flat-screen monitors. The viewer enters the immersive installation and is surrounded by tightly framed images of artists’ hands at work—painting, burning, drawing, and carving. The cycle of videos is an archive of the creative labor of twenty multi-generational women–Kelly Akashi, Isabelle Albuquerque, Lita Albuquerque, Leilah Babirye, Fiona Connor, Jean Foos, Aimee Goguen, Samara Golden, Kate Hall, Jennie Jieun Lee, Siobhan Liddell, Nevine Mahmoud, Reverend Joyce McDonald, Liliana Porter, Adee Roberson, Ana Tiscornia, Sara VanDerBeek, Uman, Faith Wilding, and Rosha Yaghmai–and foregrounds what a largely patriarchal and capitalist art world so often ignores, obscures, and erases: the work, experience, and contributions of women.

Days of 2024 is on view through August 17, 2024.