Quotes about “Empyrean”:
"’Empyrean’ presented a loose narrative of appropriated and layered imagery so perfectly edited it was seamless. Relying on Renaissance painting esthetics, Evans' chaotic and beautiful piece utilized luscious texture, luminous skin, and quirky pop cultural references to examine global politics, television, fashion, and consumerism.”
“’Empyrean’ is intense, thought-provoking and often humorous, all of the things I enjoy in a work of art... Sitting in front of it, you are surrounded by this epic vision that both horrifies and amuses.”
“Empyrean, at Luxe, [is a] showstopper of a video,.. a total cacophony of images and references, a super-epic commentary on the American now. Movie stars, logos, the military... it's America here and abroad, everywhere, from the internet.”
“Marrying the old-fashioned art of collage to the newfangled technology of computer animation, Cliff Evans has produced a gripping five-screen video projection resembling a psychedelic ‘Last Judgment.’”
“Empyrean presents us with an empire of decadence and destruction in which stereotypical desert landscapes, from Las Vegas to Palestine, are confused and conflated... Evans’s simulacrum of life from a young American male’s laptop-bound perspective is utterly contemporary but also, in its heightened color and ethical message, recalls Northern Renaissance paintings of the Last Judgement... In combining eccentric mystical and religious imagery with social criticism, Evans questions our superficial pleasures by mirroring them in a wildly entertaining style.”
“Like a magic carpet, Evans' 6-minute recurring video loop carries viewers through a virtual sandstorm of pop culture and advertising logos, religious icons and vaguely-familiar Internet images... [H]e has funkified Madame Gardner's Venetian-style palace with a cutting-edge video installation that cunningly recasts the torrent of images spewing through our lives into a morality tale of cultural collisions.”
“’Cliff Evans: Empyrean,’... is an overstimulating pop-culture critique packaged in a wealth of images that intrigue and reward the engaged viewer.”
“Evans digitally assembled the six densely collaged simultaneous scenes from images he found on the Web... The scenes seep into your brain. The images feel familiar, but if you try to place them, they’re elusive. What is real and what is fiction becomes slippery, a reflection of our synthetic double-speak era... Lots of artists have been mining the Internet for material. Often the result is an aimless jumble that simply reflects the Web’s chaos back at us. But Empyrean is one of the rare Internet-inspired pieces with rich, complex, coherent form.”
“With the internet as his source, Evans animates both militaristic and commercial images to create dramatic moving photomontages that illicit reverence, fear, and humor. Placed within the context of the [Gardner] Museum, his 'digital polyptych' appears like a religious altarpiece, perfectly at home among Gardner's diverse and evocative collection.”
“Evans uses cutting-edge technology to create sweet, buzzy eye candy, which turns out to have much more substance than sugar. In some ways, he brings video art full circle, using spectacle to its utmost in order to point out how empty it can be.”
Quotes about “Bare Life”:
“But the 5 stars go to... Cliff Evans, for his witty 5 channel video object... Resembling a shooting gallery game, to eerie futuristic soundtrack, rings of paper-doll-flat booth girls cycle up on escalators to the front while yellow armored vehicles wrap around in vertical circles amidst storm troopers --all seeming to be orchestrated from an underground bunker. The piece sheds light on the subterfuge that corporations and the government use to control us without our knowing.”
“With a careful selection of images..., the artist composes a photomontage animation that denounces a society obsessed with the cult of the body in a techno-fetishistic era. Here, the predominant culture of sex and the banal interrelates with elements taken from the artist’s personal universe, converging to a whole altarpiece of exquisite iconic richness and voluptuousness.”
Quotes about “Mount Weather”:
“Part conspiracy theory, part end of the world, and all LSD, Evans’s opus honors a paranoiac’s dream...”
“...Cliff Evans' The Road to Mount Weather steals this show. More than a year in the making, the video's three sections stretch across a 20-foot length of wall in a spellbinding tour de force... [tracing] the trajectory of our oft-imagined new-age apocalypse as it unfolds.”
“With a pinch of Hieronymus Bosch and another of William S. Burroughs, Evans’s three-channel video installation brilliantly portrays twenty-first-century phobias in this up-to-the-minute version of purgatory.”
-Barbara London, Associate Media Curator, MOMA
“[Evans’s] work culls and collages images found on the Internet to create 15 minutes of sophomoric conspiracy themed panoramas thus calling into question London's taste and virtually every other pick on her ArtForum list.”
“Cliff Evans's extraordinary three-channel video installation, "The Road to Mount Weather", is at Location One. This ambitious and very impressive work,... was like watching a vintage 3-strip Cinerama spectacle documenting the continuing dream-become-nightmare which is likely to be remembered as the culmination of the American imperium.”
“[T]he best show i've seen so far in New York is Cliff Evans' The Road to Mount Weather at Location One, a giant three-screen diptych video loop of found internet images collaged together into a giant panoramic portrait of 21st century consumption and conspiracy. It is a beautifully grotesque rendering of what Thomas Friedman said in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree: ‘The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas... And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.’"
“The trouble with The Road to Mount Weather, however, is that while the Internet may be a vast resource of juvenile creative energy, there is no point in simply rearticulating that in the form of a giant panorama. [The Road to Mount Weather] turns out have a lot more to do with shit, piss, and semen, than you might think.”
“[W]hat really knocked our socks off at this show was Cliff Evans' three-channel installation projection "The Road to Mount Weather." This 15-minute loop of photorealistic collage animation offered a kaleidoscope of internet-appropriated images edited into a VistaVision-wide phantasmagoria. World leader pretenders, athletes, soldiers, porn performers, and other just plain odd figures float by as if trapped in some vaguely paranoid vision of the now, where the generically happy couples of online singles advertising descend into Boschian rabbit holes. Whether it's visual allegory as epic painting or obsessive animation as conspiracy theory doesn't matter--one full sitting with it is enough to leave you drunk on its rippling, sensual ideas.”
-J. Bowers, Baltimore City Paper
“’Material Matters’ real centerpiece is Cliff Evans’ three-channel moving image projection, "The Road to Mount Weather." With a soundtrack that includes applauding crowds, religious choruses, and other vague yet evocative sounds, porn stars, soldiers, politicians, and religious figures drift hypnotically through war-torn wastelands, suburban neighborhoods, and sports arenas, creating a bizarrely soothing brand of information overload.”
“Evans' 15-minute video... is an absurdist compendium of all the excess, arrogance, folly and deceit of American society that might actually make a place such as Mount Weather necessary one day. In its inventiveness and sardonic humor, it's a vision of a mindlessly materialistic dystopia that elicits all the horrified fascination of a 60-car highway pileup.”
-Glenn McNatt, Baltimore Sun
“Evans hammers it home without any clear rhythm, nuance, or breathing space. Life isn't quite so black and white.”
“Last year's SMFA exhibit included Cliff Evans' The Road to Mount Weather, a video collage which was probably the best summation of and meditation on the Bush administration that will ever be created.”