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APEX is Evans’ first solo exhibition in Denmark, premiering a new series of works.

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The hand of industry has taken the place of the scribe, and the tower has supplanted the spire. In this

chamber is declared a devotion not to saints, but to ascent itself. The skyscraper rises here as a lat-

ter-day cathedral, its steel bones and radiant crowns exalted in the manner of sacred architecture.

Where once the mason lifted stone toward heaven, now the engineer extends the vertical will of the

city. Each tiered summit and fluted surface is inscribed with the language of velocity, capital, and light.

The works gather their lineage from the winged ornaments and sunburst crowns of Art Deco towers,

whose gleaming skins first gave the machine an image worthy of reverence, and from the Gothic ca-

thedral, whose ribs, vaults, and pointed arches translated weight into lift, matter into transcendence.

These two orders, once divided by centuries, are here made contiguous. They are compressed into

singular objects that hold both the memory of stone and the promise of speed.

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The aluminum sculptures appear as relics of this new order, fragments of a structure too vast to be

seen in total. Their wings extend like buttresses or aerodynamic fins. Their surfaces retain the grain

of their making, as if time itself were cast into them. They are not ruins, but exaltations. Forms held at

their highest articulation, where structure becomes ornament and ornament becomes force.

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At the axis stands the gridded wall work, severe and luminous. Its steel framework encloses a field of

red, as though a sanctum were sealed behind a mechanized screen. It is window and barrier alike, a

plane of containment through which something interior presses outward. If the sculptures speak of

ascent, this piece speaks of enclosure. The chamber wherein power is gathered, ordered, and made

visible.

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Thus APEX is written as a manuscript of the present age. Each object a glyph. Each surface a testa-

ment. Here, the sacred is not abandoned but translated, its forms carried forward into the architecture

of industry and the sheen of automotive finish. The cathedral has not vanished. It has been reforged in

steel and aluminum, its vertical longing recast as skyline, its ornament accelerated into the language

of the machine. And at the highest point, at the apex, these works remain, suspended in their own elevation, neither

ascending nor descending, but fixed in a state of perpetual exaltation.

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Lara Joy Evans (b. 1993, Los Angeles) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Working with classi-

cal and industrial materials, along with contemporary machinery, Evans has developed a practice of

painting, machinic image production, and sculpture that play with matrices of architecture, manufac-

turing, and symbolic systems. Drawing from both historical and contemporary visual cultures, Evans

uses neural networks as generative tools, feeding them vast image sets of human artifacts, ornament,

and built environments.

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From this process, new forms are extracted – neither fully authored nor entirely automated – and

translated into physical objects through casting, fabrication, and painting. Evans received a BA from

the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her work has been exhibited international-

ly at institutions such as Viennacontemporary, Felix Art Fair, Ashes/Ashes, Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic,

Tufenkian Fine Art Gallery, Final Hot Desert, and Arebyte Gallery.

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The exhibition is supported by Statens Kunstfund, Augustinus Fonden and Københavns Kommune.

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