“For my artist selection, I established a condition of including only artists who have entered my studio / brain space to such a degree that it has compelled me to have painted a part from each of the artists’ past paintings into my own paintings.

YOU AGAIN adopts its title and narrative structure from Debra Jo Immergut’s 2020 novel You Again, the story of a protagonist painter in contemporary New York City encountering a person who resiliently appears as her younger artist self from the 1990s. As with the novel, YOU AGAIN stretches linear time into a contemporary elastic, plastic and porous shape, space, and dimension. Recursive signs transform a point in time to a reflexive, uncontainable quality and quantity.

YOU AGAIN tautly tethers past to present and present to past. I selected artists that I have had a long discourse with and have been inspired to the point of incorporating parts of their work into my own. I am especially drawn to the parallel of my knowing these artists across time and showing two works reflecting that across time.

My recollection of the exhibitions where I was first inspired by each artist’s work spans a ten year period from the mid- late 1990s to the mid-late 2000s in New York City. I met the artists Ann Pibal, a graduate school classmate at University of Iowa, and Eric Wolf, among my first New York City art friends, before knowing their work. I met the artists Pedro Barbeito, Jackie Gendel, Elliott Green, Josephine Halvorson, Fabian Marcaccio, Tom McGrath, and Tracy Miller after being drawn into their practices through various exhibitions. YOU AGAIN meets You Again, and optimistically “you too, again.” - Franklin Evans

you again

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