Evan Locke

I am an artist living and working in Victoria, BC. I completed my Masters of Fine Art in Visual Arts at the University of Victoria (UVic) in 2017 where I also received a Bachelor of Fine Arts with honours in 2008.

I see my paintings as tools to promote a conscious awareness of architectural space and the viewer’s presence within it. In my current body of work, the application of paint is wholly facilitated by the supporting structures themselves, ensuring all the implements of the paintings’ creation are present. In this way, the paintings function to reveal the nature of their own existence. The immediacy of a direct causal relationship of mark to its origin

allow the paintings to shift from abstraction to actuality. The paintings are simultaneously recording medium and instrument; not just visual records but articulated proof of an event taken place.

Rather than the painterly signifiers of the artist’s hand, the mechanically operable support structures convey the physical interaction of a performer. The physicality of the rough lumber construction and the unedited transfer of paint to raw canvas advocate an authenticity and truthfulness in process and materiality. The works are not meant to suspend disbelief or satisfy the expectation of pictorial painting. Instead, I am looking to uncover a meaningful realization in a viewer of confronting reality. In today's world, filled with digital and virtual interaction, I want to reaffirm a physical existence in a viewer - and in myself through the making of the work.