Boston, MA - Cliff Evans: Empyrean, 2007 is a new digital installation by leading video artist Cliff Evans and the first solo-museum exhibition of the artist’s work. Using recognizable images from contemporary advertising excerpted from the Internet to create an animated five-panel collage, Evans turns a critical eye on contemporary American culture and challenges the viewer to confront issues of power, politics, militarism life-style and control in our society. Infused with the artist’s wry sense of humor and keen eye for color and detail, Empyrean is as engaging as it is disquieting.

Cliff Evans: Empyrean is on view at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on exhibition through January 13, 2008.

“Fast-moving images surround and bombard us in every part of our lives as never before,” says Pieranna Cavalchini, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, who invited Evans to live and work at the museum in 2006. “Evans takes complex, recognizable images –commercial logos, pop and religious icons, etc. – and manipulates them using rhythm, motion, and time to create complex juxtapositions that pull the viewer in. Once engaged, the viewer is obliged by the sound, the beauty, and the horror of the animated, highly focused images to look more closely and to watch as a strong political and social critique emerges. It is there, and it is vitriolic.”

Cliff Evans first came to the Gardner Museum as an Artist-in-Residence in 2006 following his graduation from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (sMFA), Boston, and being awarded the Medici Society’s traveling scholarship grant. During his time in the school’s prestigious “Fifth Year Program,” Evans’ created The Road to Mount Weather, a three-channel installation using techniques similar to those employed in Empyrean. The Road to Mount Weather won acclaim at New York’s Location One, where it was heralded as one of the best works of the year by Barbara London, Associate Curator at Museum of Modern Art: “With a pinch of Heironymus Bosch and another of William S. Burroughs, Evans’s three-channel video installation brilliantly portrays twenty-first-century phobias in this up-to-the-minute version of purgatory,” wrote London in artFORUM magazine.

The 30-year-old artist now based in Brooklyn, New York, recently also began his first semester as a faculty member at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (sMFA). His work has been shown locally at the Museum of Fine Arts, Jodi Rotenberg Gallery and Brickbottom Gallery in Somerville as well as at the Maryland Art Place, Baltimore; at Creative Research Lab, Austin; and at Location One, NY. He has also screened at numerous film festivals, including CinemaTexas and the Brooklyn and Boston Underground Film Festivals, and his collaborations with composers have at Tanglewood, Harvard University and the Camberwells Composers’ Collective in London.

CONTEMPORARY ART AT THE GARDNER Empyrean is curated by Pieranna Cavalchini, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Cavalchini directs the museum’s unique Artist-In-Residence Program, which continues Isabella Gardner’s legacy of supporting living, working artists. Artists across a range of disciplines are invited to live and work on site to further their artistic practice and to provide new ways of looking at the museum’s collection and history. Evans was the 52 nd artist to participate in the residency program which began in 1999. The 2007 Artist-in-Residence program is made possible, in part, by the Nimoy Foundation and generous individuals. The Gardner Museum receives operating support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

ISABELLA STEWART GARDNER MUSEUM • 280 The Fenway Boston MA 02115 - Modeled after a 15th-century Venetian palazzo surrounding a courtyard garden, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum houses one of the most remarkable art collections in the world, featuring works by Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Raphael, Degas and Sargent. Visit us on line to learn more about our special exhibitions, concerts and evening programs. Visit : www.gardnermuseum.org