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Evie Falci's work is a trip from Brooklyn to Baltimore and back. Paintings that blur the line between canvas and sculpture parallel lo-fi fractalized SFX and the infinite spaces of Yayoi Kusama. If you've been to Market Hotel and had to use the bathroom, or seen nearly any photo from there, you've seen a largely uncredited painting of Evie's. The hallucinatory room filled with eyeballs is hers. It's in Pterodactyl's video for "December," too.

At her new home and studio, Evie spent the first fifteen minutes of our interview shittalking, discussing skid row and prison, explaining why she used to dress like a bum and walk like a crackhead, explaining how to talk about weed smoking aliens to babysitted kids, and cursing. She then started to take out work to show and asked when we were going to start recording.

Destroy everything up until this moment.

Okay. Why don't you introduce yourself then.

My name is Evie Falci. I am 25 years old and I'm an artist and I am from Brooklyn, New York, continuing to work and live in Brooklyn, New York. I went to MICA. I graduated in '07. Before that I went to Fiorello Laguardia High School for Music and the Performing Arts, which is Fame. Laguardia was just like that movie, except the scenes where all the jocks are singing and dancing. It was just like that with art majors wearing all black, being like, “Fuck you guys, I hate my life.”

I knew some kids that went to Laguardia. One tried to stab me.

Sounds about right.

Now I've been mostly working on abstract paintings that use craft materials that are riffing with high and low, and modernism, and kitsch, and minimalism, and craft.

How did you get involved in the craft industry?

[Laughs] I was making these drawings back when I was in school. They were these crazy, dense, all over marker drawings. Most of them are 4' x 5' or 5' x 5. I wanted to use marker because it's a childhood material, it's accessible and it's poppy and also because I was way more into drawing than painting. But I realized that I was more interested in the formal games of color and shapes and space and that the content of them wasn't really important. And so I started to add these little craft elements and those became more interesting to me than any representational stuff that I was doing so then I just started making things out of one material.

I've actually been trying to get back into mark making, like that one over there above the door is the most recent and definitely one that is dancing around mark making again.



It's more collagy.

Yeah, more collagy. It's more of a straight up painting. It's a different process. It's a different way of thinking.

Are you mostly doing mark making or are you doing minimal stuff now?

I'm doing alot of things, the most recent thing that I've been working on is this pillow. It's not done, but it's kind of a sculptural object, but also like a 2-D painting. It's kind of harlequin, stained glass, crafty mom.

What are you painting on that with?

It's all puffy paint.

This one is a recent one. It's all rhinestones on denim. It's kind of space age mandala, but not quite so straight up. I actually did this one as a pairing to this stud one. They both kind of started out with these squares on squares outburst and then I was thinking--

I like that you keep all your art in your bathroom.

Well, the stud on pleather somehow felt very appropriate to have in here.

I used to keep all my friend's art in the bathroom. It's a room that you can sit and appreciate things in for a minute.

Some things are good bathroom art, some things are good bedroom art.

Just to articulate about how these pieces happened, I thought, "I'm going to do this rhinestone outburst and this stud outburst and the fact they're both using the same composition, but different materials will give them different content." And the stud one made alot of sense becaues the different shapes gave different tones and gradient. But the rhinestone one just had the black on the gold on the blue and it looked really sad because rhinestones are supposed to be all the colors, so it had to get crazy. And then I started thinking about them as a couple. The stud one is the tough style of the boyfriend and the rhinestone is his trashy girlfriend or sassy boyfriend. This is the first time that I put rhinestones on the rhinestones and it's kind of weird.

You don't like it?

I like it. I've been trying to break alot of the rules that I've had cause I was riffin' in such a straight up modernist way of believing of the purity of the material. There's this googly eye painting and someone picked up a red rhinestone and asked, "What would happen if I put that here?" and I went, "No! Never!"



That one is dyed. I like that one, althought it does something very different than those. People asked me, "What are you making?" and I said, "Oh you know, some macaroni paintings."

What is the dye?

I used India ink because I don't know how to actually dye macaroni and then I looked it up and it said to get food coloring dye and distilled alcohol and then it was obvious why it turned out weird my way.

I like the different colors. I grew up with a Mennonite rug that was a pattern in a grid and two of the squares in it were a different pattern than the rest because the Mennonites believed that only God could make a perfect creation, so they messed one part up to ensure that everything else was perfect.

Do you know about Mondrian and his falling out with the diagonal guy?

No.

Theo van Doesburg was his friend who was basically making Mondrians, except they were diamonds instead of squares and he was doing diagonals and Mondrian broke up with him as a friend because he had a ideological opposition to diagonals. That's crazy town.

Go Mondrian.

I like people who have that much conviction about their stuff where it's all or nothing.

Where in the canvas do you start?

It depends. The way this rhinestone one was made was that I equally distributed the red center ones and then going around one layer each of them, going around another layer until they grew and started to collide into one another.

The red ones are strewn kind of randomly about, but trying to get about the same amount of space in them and knowing that I didn't want the whole thing to be covered, so leaving more space between them in some areas.

Do any of the round ones have tops and bottoms or is it whatever way the fall?

If part of it is kind of wonky, I'll try to make an orientation that makes it look as perfect as possible. Though, I do like the way that they're so imperfect. Someone asked me if I was a bumping artist and had studio assistants, what would the process because it such an deskilled labor. I think there's something nice about thinking about me alone doing this stuff for hours, which is how they are made. And they have such an imperfect human touch that they aren't super slick polished art products.

I like how it starts out as a perfect circle on the outside and as you get to the center it's more and more a little off.

That's how I made it, starting from the outside and then moving in.


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This is another one I am talking about in terms of mixing up the materials. These are studs and rhinestones and puffy paint and glitter on pleather.

That's everything but googly eyes.

It's all the fashion materials.

Did you start with all the center triangles?

I started with the studs and then connected them with the rhinestones and then filled in the space between.

How long does it take you to construct these?

It depends on the size and materials, and some of them go faster than others. The googly eye one we just discussed took a couple months. The macaroni ones just take a couple days.

Googly eyes, a couple months. Macaroni, a couple days.

This one is kind of crazy. This is a bulletin board painting that I made. It's kind of heavy. It's a regular bulletin board that I found in the garbage, which is why it's kind of wonky. It's a little warped.

Is that one new?

I made it a couple months ago. I started by making the interior space. I was kind of thinking of a textile, like a rug. There are references to new age or Native American stuff, but not overtly and it wasn't like I was looking at any specific rug, but alot of rugs have that border with an interior.

How long did it take?

This one actually took a long time becaue I played around with alot of different formations and pushpins are a very forgiving material becuase if you don't like something you can just take it out.

The title of this one is Messageboard. We all know what a bulletin board is. It's a site which would never have this many pushpins on it and is meant for advertising your event or whatever, but here there is no message or it's a different kind of message or vision.

It's a visionquest.



This is an outfit I did for an art fashion show I was in at PS1 where I made my paintings as outfits, which is so meta because I'm referencing fashion as it exists out in the world, like rhinestones are Liberace, Dolly Parton, ghetto fabulous, trashy mom. They exist in so many ways in so many specific cultural connotations that exist to rhinestones even before I do anything to them. To reintroduce those materials into the language of modernist abstract painting does something kind of weird, but then to take that and put it back into fashion does something even weirder.

You're not putting rhinestones on the clothes because you're referencing a mom in the 80s, you're referencing your own art.

It's so much navel gazing I don't know what to make of that. It's stupid, but it's fun.

They're very impractical. They're like armor. I can't sit down because they will pop off. And I have to wear high heeled shoes so I'm basically walking up.





There is a self-determining system which dictates the formation of a piece. It's easy to say when they are done because it's already predetermined. You're just applying the elements to the formula, which is why this all-over rhisnestone one is so different, because it's more expressive, which is exciting. There's no solids in this, and it does something where it oscillates alot more, even though it's an all over field and you can rest your eye. Or the space mandala was more expressive. Even though there is an order, it's still making it up. The order doesn't make as much sense.

You know the systems that you are using, but you are experminenting with them a little bit. It's like getting really good at math.

I'm terrible at math! I can't even do simple arithmetic. But I feel like I'm attracted to a very specific type of logic and order. I'm interested in shapes and geometry, but in terms of higher abstract principals of math: bore me to tears. But yes, there is a very specific mathematical element. Where Martin Kippenburger is a poet, I'm more of a scientist.

And there's this one, which is one of the first ones I did while I was in school. You can't really get a good sense of it from a straight-on photo because it comes off the surface so much.

I don't really consider these to be sculptures beacuse they're so much riffing with the language of painting. I'm very interested in the painting as an object.

They're standardized by the canvas.

Yeah. So, these are the things I've been making. I feel like with the newer ones I'm trying to introduce newer materials in to the mix. And also the treatment of them is becoming alot different.



I have a really weird relationship to kitsch and kind of gay culture... Someone told me that seeing this work out of the blue and not knowing who made it, they would think it was either a straight girl or a gay guy, never a straight guy. I guess that's a fair thing to say.

You can accept that.

It's fine because it's not mean.

Yeah. Well, any more disparaging remarks before I leave?

Please don't write any of that.



Evie Falci
http://eviefalci.net

For more info on the Market Hotel mural
http://benfurgal.com/ghostbusters.htm