Eva’s show could have felt like one big artwork. It seemed like an attempt to turn the “man cave”—a space where only those carrying extra inches of entitlement between their legs could enter—into a woman’s cave, dripping with testosterone, but not men’s testosterone, hers. The work wouldn’t just have pointed a finger at masculinity; it could have seized it, twisted it, claimed it. She could have taken over what was once reserved only for men: rooms where they could be bawdy, drunk, rowdy, playing and watching games.
That show could have made that energy hers, and opened it up as a space for women to be excessive, to be loud to be untamed. It could have been not a critique so much as possession.
However, the inside of this nomad gallery didn’t feel right for any of that.
The boat outside wasn’t perfect—scratched, wobbly, undeniably a real canal boat, presumbly a refusal of London’s inflated housing. Split Riviera tried to use the modernist concept of an art gallery—a neutral space with mostly white walls meant to let the viewer focus only on the artwork. But in this case, the opposite happened. The attempt to mimic that idea felt like a mismatch with Eva’s work.
The artist’s practice is about rebellion, about disagreeing with norms, not tidying them up. If the idea was to transform the space into something closer to a teenage bedroom or a man cave, then it didn’t need those perfect temporary walls at all. I wished it had stayed rough, less perfect, more alive.
I would love to see this show—or a different version of it—in a more “natural” space for Eva’s practice. A space that would be a whole environment rather a selection of separate pieces of art.
Nevertheless, the exhibited artworks were strong: stickers, which rarely fit into artists’ practices, felt perfectly matched with hers. The pieces hung from the ceiling or installed on the walls carried the same raw energy as the smaller cards, posters, and pins, but consolidated into single works of art. They contributed to the overall atmosphere and made the collection resonate as one complete, unruly gesture.