Emily Eveleth

In this exhibition Emily Eveleth expands her long-standing exploration of doughnut as subject, part of her practice for over three decades. Her compositions in these paintings challenge the understanding of inanimate nature mortes, taking on an air of portraiture. Set within backdrops of velvety greens and jacquard pinks and contextualized with titles alluding to historical figures and canonical literature, the paintings’ saturated color becomes the primary vehicle of their meaning. Her lush forms are dusted with powdery sugars and lacquered with glimmering, liquid glazes, imbued with jellies. The paintings range in size from large scale, 92 x 76 inches, to intimate, 5 x 7 inches, accentuating the experience of looking.

However, Eveleth’s doughnuts ditch the simple innocence of delicacies and hurl them into the realm of tempestuous desire. Situated in Rococo and the fleshy milieu of Jenny Saville, Eveleth’s donuts dive into the risqué—glut and pomp inundate the plump swaths of pastry. Evoking a sultry gaze on the viewer, the works connote Warhol’s Gold Marilyn, Fragonard’s The Swing, and Boucher’s Venus. The current series further pulls her subjects from still life, her muses working through bulbous fisheyes, vanity mirrors, and reflective surfaces. They become performers, characters enacting their own private fictions.

“Maybe it’s the confidence of these familiar forms that makes them so attractive,” writes Bridget R. Cooks, PhD, “Whether freshly frosted or in various states of crumbling, they want to be looked at.” Eveleth is, above all, a master at stretching the extent of what one seemingly temporal subject—in her case, the everyday confection—can be.

Emily Eveleth (b. 1960 in Hartford, CT) received her Bachelor of Arts from Smith College in 1983 and did graduate studies at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 1987.

Eveleth has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at the Zillman Art Museum, Bangor, ME; the Broad Institute, Cambridge, MA; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; the Marquee at the Boston Convention Center, Boston, MA; Keene State College, Keene, NH; and elsewhere. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at numerous institutions including the Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY; The Parrish Museum, Watermill, NY; Fairfield University Art Museum, Fairfield, CT; The Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; Brattleboro Museum of Art, Brattleboro, VT; The Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY; Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, NY; and the AEIVA at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL.

Eveleth’s work may be found in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, MA; Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE; Fairfield University Art Museum, Fairfield, CT; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; Boston Public Library, Boston, MA; Eastern Connecticut State University, Willimantic, CT; Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA; and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA.

Emily Eveleth lives and works in Sherborn, MA.