Jyles

My name is Evelyn Jyles Rodgers and I am currently a senior at Wake Forest University double majoring in Theatre and Studio Art; I will be graduating in May 2019. I am a painter, a novice woodworker, and a three-dimensional artist. I hope to live a life of creativity, continuing to paint and, eventually, becoming a professional scenographer. I believe that I would be a good addition to your team and I will ask your forbearance as I tell you a bit about myself.  Beyond my work as an artist – which I came to relatively late in my collegiate career -- I have experience across many areas of design, having served as scenic and/or lighting designer on a number of productions, as delineated in my c.v. and depicted in my portfolio. In the summer of 2016, I worked as a projections design apprentice to Kate Freer of Imaginary Media. Space constraints alone prevent me from describing the breadth and depth of the knowledge that I gained from my time with Ms. Freer, and words cannot begin to convey the joy of working with a mentor whose example will inspire me for the rest of my career.  In 2017, I developed a fully realized design for Closer by Patrick Marber, a play about fractures – fractures within relationships, and fractures within ourselves. At the play's core is that emotional violence inflicted by powerless people struggling desperately to seize control. It is the violence that we wreak on each other, broken people breaking other broken people. Provoked by the "in-yer-face" attitude of Marber's play, my design was itself fractured – a stark and sterile space where the characters' disembodied faces hovered over the desecrated bench/bed where they defiled each other's bodies and destroyed each other's lives. Last spring's production of The Adding Machine, Elmer Rice's Expressionist classic, explored the inner demons that haunt purposeless lives. At the center of the play sits Zero, whose corrupted soul is recycled by a remorseless cosmic conveyor: the play ends with Zero rushing back toward the world of the living, condemned to the perpetual pursuit of the duplicity of hope. Interposing the mechanical and the organic – I found inspiration in Der Krieg by Otto Dix and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari – design grew from denotative to connotative as the photographs, paintings, and sculptures of the '20's became my truest muse.  I am currently at work on the design for the Tedford Main Stage production of Tartuffe. For this period drama, my inspiration came from 17th century still life paintings, specifically the tradition of giving these paintings as welcoming presents for guests. Moliere’s Tartuffe is a guest who overstays his welcome, and a hypocrite who feigns piety to purse his carnal desires. In the design I incorporated stylized biblical floral references to deceit and virtue (and sexuality) and rendered them in the style of 17th century oil paintings.  In addition to my theatrical work I have also been preparing a series of paintings evocative of 17th century Dutch Still Lifes. The first two oil paintings, entitled Still Death: Mycetism and Still Death: Neurotoxin, were commentaries on society’s standards of beauty and our irrational choices to preserve certain portions of nature while ignoring the interplay of life itself. I have also explored mixed media still life drawings, in both black and white and color.  I seek to find a place of ferment, working among people of passionate intensity. As an artist, my great fear is not failure. Rather, I fear that I will lack the confidence to defend my ideas; that I will want for the conviction to follow my own vision beyond the comfortable trappings of orthodoxy; that I will cease to be my own constituency and take refuge in contingent conformity.  It is the uncertainty of imagination that delights me. Each time my notebook opens on a blank white page, I expose the darkness from which to wrest a transient beauty. In the middle of the whirlpool of inspiration beneath the fear-gnawed shadow of "the deadline," there I find the center of creation. Design done deliberately transmutes the imaginary into the tangible, the visual into the tactile, and the written into the emotive. I believe that art is the scaffolding on which we rebuild the world.