Catalog — Ethereal and Material

Excerpt of Essay by Dede Young, 2000

From it’s beginning, Ethereal & Material has been an intuitive process of selecting work. It began with my desire to show work by certain artists who use materials with freedom and without excess to express their concern with, or search for, their place in the world or universe we share. Thus, Ethereal & Material philosophically has something to do with a universal questions of life and the fact that we are here.


Abstract work conveys its meaning symbolically and can create recognition within the viewer on the deepest level…
Fire also plays a part in Margaret Evangeline’s The Confessions of Mlle. G. Burnt paper is used to express the idea of the female self disappearing through endless yearning. Treating paper like cloth, Evangeline has crumpled and stretched out a long sheet of it into a vertical frame to portray the physicality of her tragic subject, a 19th century French woman who went insane. The bed sheet was the primary place of life and longing for Mlle. G., and it was also the tormenter that inflamed her burning passion to the point of destruction.

Dede Young, Curator
Summer 2000