Fred Eversley has dedicated his five-decade career to abstract sculptural meditations on energy. Working in Venice Beach since the early 1970s, Eversley drew upon his experience as an engineer and elements of the Light and Space movement prevalent in Southern California at the time to develop the lens-like parabolic objects for which he is best known. The survey exhibition “Fred Eversley: Reflecting Back (the World),” on view through January 15, 2023, at the Orange County Museum of Art, provides an occasion to reflect on the work of the octogenarian artist, who recently relocated to New York City, and to take stock of his role as a pioneering West Coast figure. Here, Eversley discusses the long arc of his luminary, ongoing practice.

MY WORK IS ALL ABOUT ENERGY. My basic shape, the one I have worked with for over fifty years, is the parabola. The parabola is the one and only shape that is the perfect concentrator of all forms of energy. It reflects all forms of energy—light, heat, sound—identically to a single focal point. Whatever cosmic energy there is that might be bouncing around would react in the same way. So playing with and pushing the boundaries of the parabola has been the focus of my work for decades.

I learned about the parabola very early on in a popular mechanics magazine when I was a teenager. It was Newton who did an experiment of spinning a bucket of water on the vertical axis of a rope and creating a parabolic surface. This principle was then employed by astronomers in laboratories to make the technology for a telescope, using a spinning can of mercury to make a perfect parabola. When I was fourteen or so, I went down into my father’s basement and poured Jell-O into a pie pan rotating on a phonographic turntable and it formed a parabola which cast light, like mercury would. The parabola has been with me, been the core of my life’s work, since then really. Even before I made art, I was an engineer and designed high-intensity acoustical laboratories for NASA Houston, for the Gemini and Apollo space missions, so I was also dealing with and understanding energy then. My commitment and focus over all these years stems from my belief that energy is the source of everything in the world. Nothing exists without energy. It’s the most essential concept for the basis of all life. So I just tried to push that idea as far as I can. Given the state of the world now—from the climate crisis to extreme oil and gas shortages—the significance of energy as a concept and material is apparent.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.