Aprés Garde & Memetics

Evan Small

Après Garde & Memetics considers the images, characters, and ideas that persist within consciousness—and what happens when familiar forms begin carrying unfamiliar meanings.

Evan Small approaches these questions through oil painting, moving between portraiture, invented figures, cartoons, diagrams, and recognizable cultural imagery. His recurring Shadow People and Tough Critters occupy an uncertain territory between character and psychological presence. Faces remain recognizable as faces, but distortion, exaggerated color, enlarged eyes, and unfamiliar features make them feel less like conventional portraits than manifestations of something internal.

The exhibition draws in part from ideas surrounding memetics: the proposition that thoughts, images, behaviors, and cultural information can reproduce and mutate as they move between people. Small brings that idea into contact with cartoons and other familiar visual forms. Characters associated with entertainment and childhood appear alongside patents, technical diagrams, scientific language, and systems of information—placing the immediately recognizable against structures that are considerably harder to understand.

Throughout the exhibition, humor and unease remain close together. Cartoon imagery can appear playful while carrying philosophical or psychological weight; a portrait can become strange without entirely losing its humanity.

Après Garde & Memetics uses that instability to examine the distance between what we recognize and what we understand—treating images as vessels through which ideas, identities, and versions of the self can be transmitted and transformed.