Downtown, Los Angeles
Evan Robarts
Rebound
Elliott LevenglickFor his inaugural solo show in Los Angeles, Evan Robarts presents new sculptures and an installation at Elliott Levenglick Gallery in Downtown Los Angeles. The show is titled "Rebound," a word Robarts chose for its allusion to sports and the literal motion of returning, as well as a resilience in the grander scheme of life. It draws on the material substance of inner urban areas as a metaphor for the temporal and physical systems a city adheres to. The exhibition includes eleven fence pieces, the latest editions to an ongoing series Robarts began in 2013. With various colorful balls suspended within the chainlink, these can be alternately modified to hang like a canvas, stand staggered on the floor, or lean on the wall for support. The sections of fence are, of course, removed from a context where they could be functional. The framework of the chainlink evokes for Robarts a gridded network of metropolitan streets, with incontrovertible separations between communities of people that he sees as represented by the balls—each isolated, anonymous and caught between barriers. Robarts will also debut a largescale freestanding assemblage titled Halftime, comprised of a decrepit chain basketball hoop and a rusty wheelbarrow. Here, the elements of work and play fuse into one, conjuring the activities that might fill up a day for a given individual in a city. Finally, for the first time ever, Robarts will stage Serve(2016) an ephemeral, site specific mural installation that will remain on view for the duration of the show. The result of experiments that were, until now, relegated to his studio, Serveis created as Robarts repeatedly bounces a charcoalcoated tennis ball off the white walls of the gallery, a gesture that literally reflects a pattern of “rebounds” through the marks it makes. Robarts (b. 1982, Florida) graduated from Pratt in 2008 with a BFA in sculpture. He has had solo shows at Galerie Jeanroch Dard in Brussels and The Hole in New York, and has been included in group shows at Balice Hertling and Bryce Wolkowitz in New York as well as at Vigo Gallery in London and Bank in Shanghai. He has also exhibited at the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse in Miami and The Still House Group in Red Hook, Brooklyn. In 2015, he was commissioned to design a site specific installation for the fall window displays at the Hermès flagship in Paris. He lives in Brooklyn and works in Manhattan, New York