Gordon Robichaux is honored to present an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist, Eve Fowler. This is the artist’s first exhibition at the gallery, as well as her first in New York since her solo exhibition at Participant Inc in 2016.

The exhibition is installed throughout both of Gordon Robichaux’s spaces and introduces a new body of work including a film, a series of colorful text collages, and a nine-channel video installation. Throughout, Fowler expands on her ongoing concerns—visibility, language, and cultural biases as those topics relate to gender politics and queerness.

In the larger of Gordon Robichaux’s spaces (Suite 925), Fowler will present, Florence Derive (2023), a 16mm film transferred to digital and projected as a large image on the wall. Fowler was inspired to make a work after reading a text that describes Derive’s boyhood and begins with vignettes of time spent with her grandmother, who supported her creativity, gender expression, and engagement with objects and the natural world. Derive goes on to recall her difficulties in school as the result of abuse from a male teacher who criticized her effeminacy. In the third section, Derive expresses the importance of her time in art school, where she embraced her life as an artist and found love, support, and acceptance.

For the film, Fowler made an audio recording of Derive reading the text, which she combined with footage of the artist in her Paris studio. Rather than filming Derive reciting the text, Fowler invited her to sit quietly in her studio, surrounded by her paintings, looking directly into the camera without speaking. By juxtaposing visual and aural elements, Fowler creates a poetic portrait that centers and makes visible Derive’s life experience.

The second room of the gallery features a group of collages from Fowler’s ongoing series of text works composed with colorful, irregular letters hand-cut from paper. While Fowler’s previous works featured excerpts from Gertrude Stein’s writing, for the collages in this exhibition, Fowler mined lists of words and phrases she kept from her own daily practice of recording peripheral observations. The playful, frenetic shapes of the letters and phrases memorialize consciousness as concrete poetry and invite the viewer to create new associations and meaning.

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In Suite 907, a nine-channel video installation titled Labor (2023) is comprised of twenty videos presented on nine flat-screen monitors attached to a circle of poles mounted to the floor and ceiling. 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 and foregrounds what a largely patriarchal and capitalist artworld so often ignores, obscures, and erases: the work, experience, and contributions of women.

Artists featured in Labor:

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.

1. Florence Derive was filmed in 16mm by Clément de Hollogne, edited by Rhys Ernst, color corrected by Olivia Ambrosia Taussig-Rees, developed and transferred to digital by Silverway Paris, and produced by Lucas Michael.  The audio was recorded by Léonard de Hollogne. The work was created with the support of the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Roy Lichtenstein Award.

2. Florence Derive, “The History of Herstory,” Seymour Magazine, October 28, 2011, www.magazine.seymourprojects.com/2011/10/florence-derive-the-history-of-herstory/.

3. Labor was filmed in digital video by Eve Fowler, Mariah Garnett, and Lucas Michael; edited by Rhys Ernst; color corrected by Olivia Ambrosia Taussig-Rees; and produced by Eve Fowler and Lucas Michael. The work was created with the support of the 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Roy Lichtenstein Award and a 2021 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.

Eve Fowler (b. 1964; Philadelphia, PA) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Expanding from a foundation of photography, her two-dimensional works take the form of billboards, paintings, posters, prints, collages, and signs using mediums such as neon, paper, paint, and vinyl. In addition, she creates installations, films, and sound works made through collaborations with other artists, filmmakers, and writers.

Fowler earned her BA at Temple University in 1986 and her MFA at Yale University in 1992. She has presented solo exhibitions at Morán Morán, Los Angeles; Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland; Participant Inc, New York; and ArtSpace, Sydney, Australia. Public art projects include: A Universal Shudder (curated by Jake Yuzna and BF Hall) for the LAX Art Program (2022); A Spectacle and Nothing Strange (animated by Aimee Goguen and curated by Jeanne Vaccaro and ONE Institute (2022); and The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project on the Interstate 10 Freeway, organized by LAND, 2014.

Fowler’s work was included in numerous group exhibitions, notably Sites of Reason: A Selection of Recent Acquisitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She has published two books: Anyone Telling Anything Is Telling That Thing (Printed Matter, 2013) and Hustlers (Capricious, 2014). Her recent film, with it which it as it if it is to be, was screened at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Lumber Room, Portland, OR; and Tate St. Ives, UK, in 2018. She is a recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Roy Lichtenstein Award (2022), the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2021), the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard University (2018–19), and an Art Matters grant (2017).

Fowler’s work is included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

In addition to her studio practice, Fowler organizes Artist Curated Projects, a Los Angeles-based curatorial project she co-founded in 2008 with artist Lucas Michael.