Eliza Evans experiments with sculpture, print, video, and textiles to identify disconnections and absurdities in social, economic, and ecological systems. The initial parameters of each work are carefully researched and then evolve as a result of interaction with people, time, and weather.

Evans was born in a rustbelt steel town and raised in rural Appalachia. Her work was exhibited at the the Bronx Museum (2022), The Missoula Museum of Art (2021), Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, NY (2020), Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua, NY (2019), Edward Hopper House Museum, Nyack, NY (2019), Chashama Sculpture Field, Pine Plains, NY (2018), BRIC, Brooklyn (2017), and Purchase College, Purchase, NY (2017). Residencies include the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, UC Santa Barbara (2020), Bronx Museum AIM, and Franconia Sculpture Park, Shafer, MN (both 2019). Evans holds an MFA from SUNY Purchase College in visual art and a Ph.D. in economic sociology from the University of Texas at Austin. Evans is currently a member of NEW INC, the cultural incubator of the New Museum in New York City.

All the Way to Hell is an activist art project for disrupting fossil fuel development on private land in the United States.

All the Way to Hell LLC owns a technically worthless mineral property in Creek County, OK. Recently fossil fuel companies have expressed interest in acquiring or leasing the land through their landman agents. The landman is responsible for gaining access to targeted mineral rights. Frequently landmen have no idea on whose behalf they are working. This project aims to discourage landman interest in this particular property by imposing unimagined and tedious bureaucratic burdens upon the use of this property. In short, the idea is to be as big a pain in the ass as possible.

This project exploits some unique features of U.S. private property ownership. Property rights extend to heaven (ad coelum) and to hell (ad inferos). The 1862 Homestead Act granted private property owners mineral rights to encourage western expansion. Mineral rights extend, in theory, ~4000 miles to the center of the earth. They can be severed from the surface and leased, transferred, traded, or sold separately. In all states, mineral rights supersede surface rights and mineral ownership may be the most powerful, racialized, and inequitable form of property ownership in the U.S. 

Through mass participation, All the Way to Hell seeks to use the privilege and power of mineral ownership against itself to make whatever oil and gas lie beneath inaccessible.

There is a possibility that this organized protest will eventually fail, and the frackers will frack. If the fossil fuel deposits are highly desirable, all resistant property owners can be drilled through a legal process that forces consolidation of properties within a given mineral reserve. The mineral owners will be notified but no action is required. In this instance, mineral owners will receive their small share of the royalties, which means paying out on these fractional interests will remain an administrative burden for the life of the well. Imagine a fossil fuel company's irritation of having to cut you a check for $1.20 every quarter and doing that by the hundreds.

This project is only the first of what we hope will become many. Over time, All the Way to Hell will become a platform for large-scale, distributed noncooperation in oil and gas regions across the country.