The process of selecting an image, usually an archival photograph found in an antique shop, is almost as important to Ian Everard's work as the final production. Everard is not an archivist, rather, as with lightening to a lightening rod, Everard coaxes memory from cultural artifacts. Searching through stacks of old photographs, Everard waits for something to strike him, an expression, a pose, an imperfection, some minutia. Using water colors Everard's meticulous recreation of a photograph (or some other found object) begins to reveal details, unearth the signatures of memory buried within the object itself.

Everard unveils the 'truth' behind his subject; in the most fundamental sense, what is revealed is composition and form. The very process of painting, of recreating the image, recalls earlier traditions in visual culture, history painting in epic scale, such as by David, or scenes common to our tradition, such as Christ being taken down from the cross, martyrs, and heroes. There is further the surplus meanings that again, through the process of reproduction, reveal themselves. Whether he has left details out, or rendered them precisely, Everard extricates the photograph from the tradition of realism; documented history. In contrast to the photographic medium, which crystallizes a particular time, painting is laborious, a drawn out process; masses, with Everard's attention, become a collection of individual people. Under Everard's scrutiny the photograph is transformed. The cold stoicism, the pure reportage that the photographic medium is typically thought to deliver, opens up. While these images might appear as some token of the past we soon discover that it is not that the images haunt us, but that it is we who haunt them. We project our anxieties, ambitions, our identity on to these images of the past. Everard, however, by shattering the icy exterior of the photograph, allows us to traverse temporal continuity, collapsing time and space.

For more information on this artist, please visit www.soa360.com/ianeverard/index.html.