Eureka, California
Barn Gallery
There is no real English antonym for entropy—perhaps because situations in which matter seems to self-organize, taking shape out of nothingness, have always been rare. Becky Evans and Lori Goodman’s installation PLAY (on view through December 31, 2024) delivers this unusual experience to tonic effect, at a moment when almost every other social, political, and ecological system is in decline. The artists conjure big effects from modest means, fixing textured masses of excelsior—also known as wood wool—to the gallery walls. Thousands of coiled shavings mass together into a tangled pelt that rambles like kudzu, blurring the room’s edges.
In a usage apparently exclusive to North America, the term “excelsior” references softwood shavings used for packaging or stuffing furniture. (The saga of the Latinate word’s 19th-century decline—from New York state motto to title of a popular poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, to brand name of a once-ubiquitous byproduct of resource extraction—is as cogent a capsule of American microhistory as one might hope to find.) Bulky but almost weightless, the excelsior builds up along these walls into great burgeoning drifts and piles. Innumerable threads dyed in saturated hues of crimson, indigo, lime, and violet generate unpredictable chromatic chords as they layer and converge. Wiry, tangerine-colored coils twist across a billowing surface of blue and scarlet, while shaggy clumps pull away from the undifferentiated mass and assume globular, pendulous, or conical forms.
PLAY is the fruit of a multi-year collaboration that began during the Covid-19 pandemic. Hand-dyeing the excelsior took months, and the process of affixing the loose masses began in the fall of 2023, with the artists moving slowly through the space on lifts and ladders. On hiatus from their individual studio practices, with no pressure imposed by external templates or timelines, Evans and Goodman were free to let the work take shape organically. The tendencies inherent in excelsior informed their approach. Composition evolved from circumstance, each collaborator intermingling hues as impulse prompted.
The artists are old friends who met in the 1980s, after they each relocated from the Los Angeles area to California’s rural north coast. Goodman opened the Woolmark, a Eureka fiber arts supply store; Evans taught weaving and fiber arts classes at Humboldt State University and College of the Redwoods. They have worked independently to develop singular bodies of work in sculpture—often, although not exclusively, employing textiles and fibers. Through this collaboration, they have been able to pool decades of collective weaving and dyeing experience. PLAY involves bulk material that Evans sourced from a local garden supply and dye processes that Goodman mastered through study with artisans in Oaxacan and Peruvian villages.
The effect of the completed installation recalls the Star Trek terraforming episode in which a beneficent space ray sweeps across a sterile planetary surface, leaving lushly structured ecosystems as the index of its passage. It also evokes Robert Morris’s untitled threadwaste sculptures, canonic works of post-Minimalism that refuse the responsibilities of form. But Evans and Goodman’s work flips that script: rather than assuming a supine position with regard to the dictates of physics and chance, innumerable micro-units of industrial byproduct manifest a collective, ludic will to form. PLAY—both a description of process and an all-caps directive—comes across as a spirited riposte to the apothegm that things fall apart.
To arrange a visit to PLAY, please message the artists directly at loribgoodman.com.
