Milk Flows Like White Lava in Jeremy Everett’s “Floy”
It’s hard to imagine something as grand as Jeremy Everett’s Floy (2015) taking place anywhere other than America. What appears to be a sheet of snow turns out to be milk spilling from an overturned truck—gallons upon gallons of milk, spreading over the ground like white lava. The whole process was filmed from a helicopter, resulting in a four-minute double-channel video. A shiny piece hacked off from the truck takes center stage in Everett’s solo exhibition at Edouard Malingue Gallery in Hong Kong.
In a nod to the land art movement of the late 1960s, Everett’s video is less a rallying call than pure depiction of the effect a man-made intervention might have on the natural landscape. The milk will eventually disappear, but it has already made its mark on the landscape.
Near the hefty Floy remnant, Everett expresses a delicate tonal abstractionist style by dispersing smoke pigments onto canvases via a pump. A strong sense of materiality runs through the gossamer-like pieces. Faint outlines of crosses hint at the support structures behind the large canvases—ghostly evidence of the art-making process. And the smoke-pigment pumps, are they art in themselves or merely tools along the way?
In Untitled (Fountain) (2016), pink-tinted water gurgles inside a plastic bag. Some of the liquid has seeped through the bag during the course of the exhibition, tainting the gallery floor with dots of pink. The puddle looks like a living organism, not unlike the flowing white mass in Floy—another instance of liquid freeing itself from its container.
—Christie Lee
“Jeremy Everett: Floy” is on view at Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong, Feb. 3–Mar. 12.