
Fred Eversley has committed his 5-decade job to summary sculptural meditations on energy. Doing work in Venice Seaside considering that the early 1970s, Eversley drew upon his expertise as an engineer and elements of the Mild and Area movement widespread in Southern California at the time to acquire the lens-like parabolic objects for which he is most effective known. The survey exhibition “Fred Eversley: Reflecting Again (the Environment),” on check out by means of January 15, 2023, at the Orange County Museum of Art, provides an celebration to reflect on the perform of the octogenarian artist, who just lately relocated to New York City, and to just take inventory of his position as a pioneering West Coast figure. Listed here, Eversley discusses the lengthy arc of his luminary, ongoing practice.
MY Work IS ALL ABOUT Energy. My simple shape, the just one I have worked with for in excess of fifty yrs, is the parabola. The parabola is the just one and only form that is the fantastic concentrator of all kinds of electricity. It reflects all kinds of energy—light, heat, sound—identically to a one focal position. Regardless of what cosmic power there is that might be bouncing all around would respond in the exact same way. So actively playing with and pushing the boundaries of the parabola has been the concentration of my function for a long time.
I uncovered about the parabola really early on in a well known mechanics magazine when I was a teen. It was Newton who did an experiment of spinning a bucket of h2o on the vertical axis of a rope and making a parabolic area. This theory was then used by astronomers in laboratories to make the know-how for a telescope, employing a spinning can of mercury to make a fantastic parabola. When I was fourteen or so, I went down into my father’s basement and poured Jell-O into a pie pan rotating on a phonographic turntable and it fashioned a parabola which cast gentle, like mercury would. The parabola has been with me, been the main of my life’s operate, given that then seriously. Even ahead of I made art, I was an engineer and created substantial-depth acoustical laboratories for NASA Houston, for the Gemini and Apollo house missions, so I was also working with and knowing power then. My determination and concentration above all these yrs stems from my belief that electricity is the supply of almost everything in the globe. Absolutely nothing exists without vitality. It is the most critical strategy for the foundation of all life. So I just experimented with to force that thought as significantly as I can. Offered the state of the planet now—from the weather disaster to extraordinary oil and gas shortages—the importance of electricity as a thought and material is clear.

Most of my works derive from electrical power concentration on a parabolic area. For the scaled-down will work, I use a modified turntable with a variable speed motor on it, and a handmade mold to make a total array of parts. I’ve always cast and then polished them myself. The sharpening is the the greater part of the operate, essentially: That is when the color and the reflective high-quality come out. The lens has a fisheye outcome, so you can see on your own in the operate. I generally operate with the romance amongst the viewer and the object, and the connection between what surrounds the viewer and what surrounds the object. My work makes this energetic interconnectivity content. Towards the close of my time in my studio in Venice, I started off to examine new dyes and pigments. Considering that going to New York in 2019, I have ongoing to experiment with new colors that have diverse saturations and intensities and build new chromatic results. To make any operate bigger than twenty inches in diameter, I use two huge cast-iron turntables that I acquired at an auction in the 1970s. I found out that these had been the turntables utilized to machine the casings of the atomic bombs that fell on Japan.
My show at the Orange County Museum of Artwork, my fourth clearly show there, covers fifty many years of perform in a rather compact place. That was a challenge, but was also intriguing, since the clearly show comes complete circle in some methods to my first exhibition there in 1976, when it was still termed the Newport Harbor Artwork Museum. I confirmed quite a few latest polyester lenses in these new radiant colors juxtaposed with examples of my historic lenses that are all variations of violet, amber, and blue in many measurements and designs, and also mirror the reflective black lens and significant black rocker in OCMA’s collection. The smallest sculptures in that exhibit, from 1968, were being my initial spun-forged three-coloration, 3-layer cylindrical cuts, a condition which I have recently started enlarging into sculptures that are extra than 10 feet tall. This scaling-up was a thing I was thinking about even then and attempted to do a couple of instances back again in the late ’70s. Now I’m functioning with an outside the house fabricator to manufacture these substantial-scale tapered cylindrical lens sculptures in clear resin materials—we’ve created 3 so significantly. It is a thoroughly distinct optical phenomena from the spherical parabolic lenses. So demonstrating a person of these new 7-foot sculptures in Orange County makes the exhibit truly feel like both a leap and a loop.
You get up every morning, and each individual day is a new working day. In conditions of—everything. I’m lucky more than enough to be in a placement now, in my lifestyle, where by opportunities are a lot more open up than they’ve ever been to try out something new. The new series of big-scale operates presents viewers a complete corporeal dimension that can be expert outdoor with a radiant coloration spectra and a radical interaction with their environment. I am at the moment building this condition and checking out this product potential more for a significant, web-site-certain general public fee, which feels grander than the public commissions I’ve manufactured in the earlier. I have experienced the wonderful luxury of making art 1 hundred p.c of my time for around fifty decades, of exhibiting with wonderful galleries and museums. I seriously do have the emotion that the choices are endless.
— As told to Camila McHugh