These works by EveNSteve—created in Provincetown, Truro, and Wellfleet—evoke a haunting poetic mythology of Cape Cod’s outer lands. Photographed using a range of vintage film cameras, from the 1939 Minox spy camera to a 1970s 110-format and panoramic plastic cameras, the resulting images feel both archaeological and cinematic. Each print is hand-coated onto deconstructed paper bag material, a gesture that situates the work within both the everyday and the ephemeral, collapsing the grand and the mundane.
In each image, ghostlike figures drift through misty interiors and shadowed streets, evoking memory, displacement, and watchfulness. Overlaid with glyph-like symbols in black, white, and red—colors of traditional fairy tales—the drawings echo arcane alphabets, celestial navigation, and secret codes. The marks suggest maps, measurement, and narrative tension: a red box frames a subject as if under surveillance; arrows indicate unseen forces; degrees and formulas whisper occult significance. These marks don’t clarify but deepen the mystery.
EveNSteve’s layering of analog photography and symbolic drawing builds a grammar of the in-between: past and present, seen and unseen, story and cipher. These Cape Cod scenes feel like recovered dreams or records from another timeline—rooted in place, yet vibrating with myth.
EveNSteve’s 1680 House series, created within the historic William Haskell Home in Gloucester, Massachusetts, explores the haunting continuum between presence and memory. Each image—hand-printed on deconstructed paper bags and layered with symbolic markings in red, black, and white—merges the ghostly ephemerality of time with the visceral tactility of the handmade.
Rendered in soft, blurred light, the photographs depict solitary figures wandering liminal spaces. They hover between material and spirit, caught between looking out windows or turning toward the camera. The ethereal atmosphere is intensified by the use of fairytale hues: red (danger, vitality), black (the unknown, mourning), and white (innocence, spirit). These colors recall the coded emotional symbolism of folk narratives and signal the psychological terrain the work traverses.
Symbols drawn in wax and pigment pens—arrows, compass-like grids, numbers, and letters—map internal geographies more than physical ones. They evoke charts, spells, and alchemical notes. Their presence transforms each image into both photograph and palimpsest, suggesting that history here is inscribed not only in walls, but on bodies and time itself.
The Haskell House’s colonial history, with its Puritan austerity and layered domestic lives, becomes a resonant vessel. EveNSteve’s work excavates this interiority—personal, architectural, and historical—inviting viewers to imagine what remains in the air long after the living have moved on.
These mixed-media artworks are dreamlike narratives rendered through a compelling fusion of analog photography, hand-painted text, and poetic storytelling. Using Polaroid imagery transferred onto hand-coated brown paper or traditional Amate paper from Mexico, the artists root their work in tactile history. Every element — be it pigment pen, stitched line, or type — feels purposeful and intimate, as though uncovering forgotten mythologies etched into both landscape and psyche.
Each piece is a tile in a larger visual folklore. Lovely Dark Deep, inspired by Joyce Carol Oates, channels the haunted genius of Robert Frost and overlays Vermont’s rural bleakness with meditations on identity and legacy. Five of Them Are Lies, with its Cape Cod icehouse, juxtaposes domestic ritual and female agency — casting folklore not as static memory but a tool of survival. Ghost Dress animates inanimate things, granting objects emotional memory — a ghost story told from the perspective of place.
The works consistently conjure liminal spaces — half remembered, half invented — where myth meets history. Blow Through Her No More is a powerful allegory of human fragility and repair, its protagonist literally torn but dreaming of a red thread to mend herself. No One Holds Me and I Will Be Gone give voice to sea widows and wandering girls, invoking rhyme, spellwork, and elemental longing.
Critically, these works resist linear narrative. Instead, they emulate memory — fragmented, stitched, overwritten. The use of text as both image and narrative blurs poetry and visual art, resulting in a visual storytelling rooted in personal and cultural archaeology. Through layering of media, time, and voice, these works ask: What do places remember? What does the depicted figure become when seen through the prisms of myth, history, and words?
