LUCA EVANS: Lead Balloon

LEAD BALLOON, A  solo exhibition by Luca Evans.

Opening reception: Wednesday 11th September - 6pm

Walkabout: Saturday 28th September - 11am

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When I was a kid I thought America was magnificent. Things look shiny from far away. I hung the flag on my wall. When I was fifteen I got a dog and named him John F. Kennedy because I thought he was the most handsome president. And I thought it was glamorous and tragic how he got shot in that Lincoln. At a party I met a pretty girl I wanted to impress. I told her about my dog and she asked, “Why Kennedy? He dropped bombs in Vietnam.” 

That was a lead balloon kind of feeling. 

In this body of work, Luca Evans considers violence, and the impossibility of lightness when everything is heavy.  

Playing with motions of collision, Evans’s material practice employs a cut and paste approach. The flat works are made with marquetry, an archaic woodworking method in which thin pieces of wood are assembled like jigsaw puzzles. In Everything Falls Faster Than An Anvil, static images are pieced together into a moving animation. The carved sculptures are interjected with moments of colour, and throughout the show objects are intercepted with text. 

Drawing on the Looney Tunes canon, Evans engages the physics of cartoon violence. Where everybody falls out the sky but nobody dies. Bombs explode, parachutes malfunction and guns fire but there’s never indelible harm. Gravity is buoyant and time is loose and life is infinite. Every rearrangement of matter is temporary, every injury recovers. Each implementation of violence fails to land on the body.   

In Lead Balloon, this failure is deployed as a strategy of disarmament. Bullets become balloons, blades melt, anvils float weightless, war planes are turned into paper, explosions reduced to sound. Evans develops a misshapen artillery of text and object. Jokes – and artworks – do not so much land, as float off, or come crashing to the ground.

Installation images by Michael Hall