Echo Chamber

"I like to make landscapes that have a feeling to them, create some organic interplay with the viewer and the act of viewing. I am not entirely sure what that feeling is, just hope that it has a sense of presence. Because that presence is created through a really subjective process of balancing texture, shape and colour, I can only hope that this sense of consciousness transmits to others.

"These painting have their beginnings in the commercial landscape, kind of an everywhere and nowhere sort of place. My relationship to this place is a little ambivalent. On one hand I dislike its monotony and on the other I am fascinated by the strange utilitarian non-design of it and the peculiar feeling of being in an environment built exclusively for the car. Obviously I am not the first artist to find inspiration in such spaces and really it is just a place to get started.

"I chose the name Echo Chamber for one of the smaller paintings as a way to give some identity to that organic sensibility, hoping that the analogy of sound and its movement in waveforms expanding into space identifies the sensibility. I like to think of the environments of rectangles and squares that make up the majority of the surface as still and moving at the same time. I imagine that this is one of the ideas behind a lot of early modern geometric abstraction (it also appears as the set background in last season's "Jeopardy") yet I can't claim to be having an overtly conscious dialogue with painting's history. Rather, I am just trying to respond to an experience of being out in the world, moving forward."

Gary Evans, October 2009