Evan Sherman: Bad Neighbors, The Arts Fund
By Debra Herrick
Just days before the U.S. Bureau of Land Management opened 1.2 million acres of California’s Central Coast to new oil drilling and hydraulic fracturing, a seventeen-year-old opened his first solo show at The Arts Fund, framed as a “call to arms” from a young climate activist/artist.
Evan Sherman’s “Bad Neighbors” is filled with the questions and imagery that surrounded the recent youth climate marches that popped up worldwide in September at the same time as the U.N.’s climate change meetings in New York. Sherman, a Santa Barbara teenager, paints seascapes with dystopic oil rigs in the forefront, elephants and rhinos with their horns poached and broken, a whale caught in a net, a teenager masked. These are depictions of the world he knows in the visual language that’s currency in the climate action movement.
Young people brought up in Santa Barbara’s picturesque natural playground saw their local waters darkened in 2015 by an oil spill and scrape tar from their feet on Summerland’s beach where there are as many as 192 wellheads offshore. It’s plain to see these references in Sherman’s black waters on sun-filled days.
Sherman also touches on issues of waste and consumption in his paintings of aluminum soda cans and installation of concrete-cast water bottles. In one painting, toy soldiers guard the crushed cans as if referencing commodities as totems, and those concrete bottles clustered on shelves, they start to look like sad artifacts of overconsumption.
Sherman is the youngest artist to have a solo exhibition at The Arts Fund in its thirty-six year history. A wash in the exhibit, shades of vibrant blues and greens are meant to represent the entwined worlds of human culture and nature, says the artist, “many threads in a blue and green blanket—a blanket that is beginning to unravel.”
Bad Neighbors is on exhibit from Oct. 26 to Nov. 8, 2019, at The Arts Fund Community Gallery at 205 Santa Barbara St., Santa Barbara.
