Los Angeles is full of soft stories. Practically speaking, the term “soft story” refers to a building that is considered unstable because one of the lower levels is less structurally sound than the one above it, making it vulnerable, especially during an earthquake. In his new body of work, Soft Stories, Evan Whale points to both the temporal meaning and poetic implications of this phrase through nine new pieces that continue his exploration of photographic materiality and his domestic space.

Whale’s home is not a soft story itself, instead it is a mashup of questionable architectural moves sitting on a hilltop near downtown LA that is somehow bursting with botanical life. The house is fortressed with metal window grates. The branches of an overgrown persimmon tree jut into the landlord’s ramshackle storage shed. The living room floor slopes this way and that as the afternoon light divinely flickers through the perpetually fruiting citrus trees. Whale immerses himself in these ephemeral moments and offers us glimpses of his emotionally layered domestic daydreams that are at once joyful and a reminder of our fleeting natural and urban landscape.

Each work in the show begins as a quiet moment: a scalloped wooden bowl of fruit sits on the kitchen table flanked by orange marigolds basking in the morning light; a palm frond merges with the reflection of the neighbor’s Spanish roof as the sun sets on the distant horizon. But then, using his unique combination of chemical experiments, carving, and drawing, Whale unearths hallucinatory details that we would never see without his alterations.

The scalloped wooden bowl becomes an other-worldly galaxy and the palm fronds in the sunset become waving flecks of gold. His subtractive and additive marks give way to a multitude of metaphors and narratives, making each piece its own soft story.

Whale’s whimsical moves are grounded in his adept knowledge of various “high” and “low” photographic technologies. Some images were taken with a large camera format, a cumbersome and laborious process that yields incredibly detailed images, while others were taken with an iPhone 7, a now obsolete consumer-grade digital camera.

Most significantly, this exhibition marks Whale’s first foray into cibachrome printing, a once-popular, but now nearly dead, form of analog color printing. This printing process is considered a “reversal” which allows Whale to unearth rich blue and turquoise hues with his surface carving and chemical alterations in addition to the yellows and bronzes that result from carving his usual chromogenic prints. Compared to painting, photography is still a nascent medium and Whale unabashedly revels in its phases of growth.

In Soft Stories, Whale’s home becomes a microcosm of the environmental contradictions that make up Los Angeles. Much like these contradictions, Whale's process defies logic as he experiments with unlikely formal techniques and psychological states. Ultimately, these works are ephemeral moments made static and then re-energized, like the perpetual cycle of permanence and impermanence they so beautifully conjure.

- Juliana Paciulli

Evan Whale (b. 1987) was born in Washington, D.C, and lives and works in Los Angeles. Whale holds an MFA from the Yale School of Art (2014) and a BA from Bard College (2009). He has exhibited in group shows throughout the United States at Regen Projects (LA), The Flag Arts Foundation (NY), and Jeff Bailey Gallery (NY), and internationally at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, in both the Paris Pantin and the Salzburg Villa Kast locations, and had a recent booth at Future Fair (NY) with Tyler Park Presents. Recent solo exhibitions include In My Room at Tyler Park Presents in 2020, Come and See at Actual Size, Los Angeles in 2017, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, at 321 Gallery (NY) in 2016, which was also reviewed in The New Yorker magazine. His work is currently on view in Curious Visions: Toward Abstract Photography at the Denver Art Museum.