Location: UCF Art Gallery
EXHIBITION STATEMENT //
Since 2018, Amanda Leigh Evans has been collecting raw materials (photos, rocks, soils, pressings, and archival images) from Superfund sites she visits throughout the United States. A Superfund site is designated by the United States Environmental Protection Agency as a polluted location that requires long-term cleanup of hazardous material contamination, and their collection is made with the utmost caution.
Approximately 78 million people (roughly 24% of the U.S. population) live within 3 miles of a Superfund site, yet many are unaware of the dangers these sites pose. Invisible threats to human and ecological health are often not visually apparent when walking or driving past these sites. To live in the 21st Century is to reckon with our proximity and complicity with the ongoing creation of these sites.
Evan’s exhibition features ceramic sculpture, collected raw materials, large-format collage images, and research materials from several Superfund sites she has visited over the years. The project began when the artist discovered that her maternal family, which has chronic and neurological health issues, was raised on the Bunker Hill Mine Superfund Site in Northern Idaho, one of the nation’s largest and most complex Superfund sites in the United States.
BIO // b. 1989
Amanda Leigh Evans is a socially engaged artist, educator, and cultivator. Her work manifests as research-driven ceramic objects, performance, print and digital media, public art, and long-term collaborative systems that encourage dialogue across political, economic, and racial differences.
Proudly a first-gen college student from a working-class family, Evans (b. 1989) spent her childhood doing homework in the breakrooms of beauty salons and climbing on 2×4 frames at construction sites in California’s Inland Empire and rural Nevada County.
Evans’ work oscillates between self-contained work for traditional art spaces and multi-year, site-specific collaborative projects. For five years (2016-21), Evans was an artist-in-residence in a large affordable housing complex in East Portland, OR, where she collaborated with her neighbors to create The Living School of Art, an intergenerational alternative art school that centered the creative practices of their multilingual, multigenerational community. For eight years (2014-2022), Evans was a core collaborator at KSMoCA, a contemporary art museum inside a K-5 public elementary school in Portland, OR. Additionally, Evans has coauthored several multi-year projects engaging the history, politics, and ecology of the Los Angeles River through LA Urban Rangers (2011-13) and Play the LA River (2013-15).
Currently, Evans and her collaborator Tia Kramer (together known as DeepTime Collective) are developing When The River Becomes a Cloud (2021-2026), a co-authored contemporary public artwork generated with students at a PreK-12th grade public school in rural Eastern WA. DeepTime Collective was recently a one-year artists-in-residence at the Everson Museum, presenting A Day Without A Clock.
Evans holds an MFA in Art and Social Practice from Portland State University and a Post-Bacc in Ceramics from Cal State Long Beach. She is Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
ARTIST STATEMENT // Amanda Leigh Evans
My work illuminates the entanglements, joys, contradictions, and horrors of social and ecological interdependence. I create participatory, research-driven artworks that emphasize the complex, interrelated webs of the human and more-than-human world, whether we are aware of them or not. My practice is split between multi-year collaborative public projects with communities and place-based interdisciplinary ceramic works.
Research-driven ceramic works like Soil and Medium (2018) and If You Can’t Grow It, You Have To Dig It (2023) were created in conversation with geologists, miners, and industrial-scale farmers to illuminate how we are implicated in global systems of extraction through the materials we consume and the communities in which we participate. Interdisciplinary works like A Day Without A Clock (2024), a solo exhibition and performance during which Tia Kramer and I ran the Everson Museum for an entire day without any conventional clocks, investigate the mechanical clock as a familiar tool that we collectively agree upon and allow to commodify our daily lives.
Multi-year socially engaged artworks like When The River Becomes a Cloud (2021-ongoing), a co-authored contemporary public artwork generated with students, staff, and families at a PreK-12th grade public school in a town of less than 400 people, investigate what is missing when contemporary art fails to account for rural perspectives. Collaborative projects like The Living School of Art (2016-21), an intergenerational alternative art school that my neighbors and I co-created in our multilingual, multigenerational affordable housing apartment community, critique how the conventional art systems wield power. Interdisciplinary projects like the LA Urban Rangers (2011-13) and Play the LA River (2013-15) engage the social-ecological-political history of an urban watershed and possibilities for accessibility.
Through these approaches, I seek to unearth how we understand ourselves within the interconnected constructs of time, landscape, and community. I have constructed a life by code switching between urban-rural, working class-creative class, liberal-conservative, religious-secular, multicultural-monocultural spaces, and I believe that identifying areas of common ground can foster meaningful collaboration across difference. Although each of my projects are positioned to investigate seemingly contradictory entities, what ultimately emerges is evidence of invisible interdependencies and the potential for collective liberation.
Opening Reception: January 15 from 5 – 7PM -> REGISTER HERE!
Closing Reception: February 13 from 5-7PM, with an artist talk at 6PM -> REGISTER HERE!