Essay by John Stomberg
Painting in Boston 1950-2000,
Published by the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park
Lincoln. MA 2002

“At the end of our brief survey, we find Emily Eveleth, born in 1960, creating images in the nineties that further cede realism’s original idealistic field.  Eveleth focuses instead on subjects notable for being monumentally mundane.  Her project depends for its vitality on her choice of subject matter: usually doughnuts, or sometimes the back of a head.  These subjects offer a tabula rasa onto which she can, through subtle brushwork, color modulation, and visual allusion, build a still theater where comedy and tragedy vie to dominate the theme.  Her paintings rest at neither polar extreme; rather, they are in perpetual thematic motion between the two.

If we begin with the surface image – the jelly doughnuts in Shelter (1998) for example – we find first the comic: this simple, unhealthy, omnipresent food.  Its very banality allows for infinite adaptation to personal interpretation.  It is all temptation, but it is also a cautionary tale.  As Eveleth paints them, doughnuts are massive entities, bodies often rife with biblical significance.  Is her doughnut the corpus delicti or Corpus Christi?  With jelly spilling forth from within their corporeal girth, they evoke both body and blood.  They lie, like oblique martyrs on a plinth.  Eveleth’s viewers recognize that they too lie on that magnificent horizontal slab.  As that corpse is, so shall we become – in this case, a doughnut.  We are what we eat.  Voila’ – we complete one of the many unending interpretative journeys from triteness to contriteness and back that Eveleth evokes with her paintings.

In conversation, Eveleth waxes enthusiastic over the idea of a true oxymoron: being a thing and its negation at the same time.  The contemporary curator and Columbia University art professor Bruce Ferguson argues that the idea permeates contemporary art practice.  “An oxymoron,” he points out, “acts as a space of limbo or undecideability, a space in which choice is suspended and contrary impulses occupy the same position simultaneously.”  Eveleth’s paintings restlessly shift across a spectrum of meanings, covering along the way all the distances between opposing significances; prosaic and profound, profane and scared, banal and intriguing, to say nothing of the axis between cool asexuality and gushing, if veiled, sexuality.”