STANDARD ISSUE MISSOURI AEROPLANE (IN MISSOURI PLANES ARE ALWAYS MISSOURI SHAPED), 2023. Machine stitched Handmade Paper mounted on Chipboard, Found Objects, Wood, MDF, Insulation Foam, Corrugated Cardboard, Joint Compound, Latex Paint, Hardware.
ARCHETYPAL MISSOURI HOUSE (IN MISSOURI HOUSES ARE INVARIABLY MISSOURI SHAPED), 2023. Machine stitched Handmade Paper mounted on Chipboard, Found Objects, Wood, MDF, Insulation Foam, Corrugated Cardboard, Joint Compound, Latex Paint, Hardware.
IN MISSOURI INDUSTRY IS OFTEN MISSOURI SHAPED, 2023. Machine stitched Handmade Paper mounted on Chipboard, Found Objects, Wood, MDF, Corrugated Cardboard, Joint Compound, Latex Paint, Hardware.
Cunst Gallery
Alex Evets: Missouri — As It Truly Is
July 13-September 14
I’ll probably keep whining for as long as MAQ’s a thing that regional art doesn’t need to focus on esoteric local shit to differentiate itself from art in other places. But criticism loses everything it’s got when it fails to respond to experience, and my experience tells me that the two best shows by St. Louis artists I’ve seen in the past year have been small-minded, guileless ditties about how strange Missouri is. One of these shows was Brittany Mosier’s Mark Twain Cave Rave. This was the other. Evets’ conceit was, “What if stuff in Missouri were shaped like Missouri?” So, he made dioramas decked with Missouri-shaped stuff, such as truck beds, houses, airplanes, and flags. Some of these he placed on top of handmade, yellow-painted stands, installed on and around which were little odds and ends. Canvases with embossed sans-serif text announced that Missouri is full of items with a Show-Me shape, but they neglected to explain why. This all amounted to a joke about flyover myopia: there’s a sort of cartoony bliss to contorting your worldview till it only accommodates one thing. A big part of why the show worked was nuts-and-bolts: Evets is an exceptionally talented maker, plus he has a rare sense for how to get disparate types of objects to come together as a formal whole. The pervading yellow palette helped him accomplish this, as did a rhyme between the slight protrusion of screwheads all over his dioramas and the way he sprinkled tchotchkes throughout the gallery. Basically, Evets’ exhibition is a bunch of smart objects smartly installed. But for MAQ’s purposes it’s more than that, too — it’s among the few shows I’ve seen in St. Louis that’s made me feel like I was seeing something that only could’ve been seen here. A lot of this came from the cheeky Missouri content, of course, but not all of it. It seems like Evets has used his provincialism to almost completely sidestep the dumb seriousness of much Contemporary art. -T.S.