Glitches & Glitter: Evelyn Contreras
by Sarah Cunningham
While in graduate school in Texas, California-born artist Evelyn Contreras studied the human-made landscape of her home state via the lens of the Internet. Then, when the COVID-19 pandemic limited her ability to travel back to Texas for a residency at the Rockport Center for the Arts, she reversed the direction of her digital gaze to Rockport’s post-Hurricane Harvey streetscapes from her desk in Santa Barbara. This virtual sojourn culminated in works featured at the Atkinson Gallery, Santa Barbara City College in 2022.
Rockport Case Study .03 is an acidic orange gif made from an image of a mid-century home destroyed by the hurricane. In it, the fractured house glitches in and out of solid form, resembling a final transmission from our post-apocalyptic Earth. The vibrating monochromatic still of the vacant home cleaved down the middle is haunting, reminiscent of Gordon Matta-Clark’s Splitting (1974), which depicts the human-made landscape, now post-human, with similar despair. Still, rather than document a poetic spatial intervention exposing the failure of societal constructions as Matta-Clark did, Contreras uses found digital imagery to explore the inherently cannibalistic devastation of the Anthropocene while critiquing the contradiction of her own obsessive doom scrolling for so-called “ruin porn” from the safety of her chair. As Legacy Russell wrote in her Glitch Feminist Manifesto, “This glitch is a correction to the ‘machine,’ and, in turn, a positive departure.”
Evelyn Contreras, installation photos, Atkinson Gallery, SBCC
Contreras’ Rockport Case Study gifs are an extension of her printmaking, infinitely replicated and looped. On the other hand, her flipbooks, made of cyclical snippets, shift from 80-frames in digital format to the 24-frames of the analog object, creating fidelity and information loss. Here, in these illusory toys, printmaking devolves from exact copy to weak simulacrum. The box holding the book and the glowing backlight both reference the elusive display screen. But then again, to fully view each flipbook, the viewer must actively participate by rotating a knob.
Flipbook series contains vibrantly colored, graphically patterned environments with shimmering surfaces and interactive objects. They simultaneously read as glossy retail shelves and carnival sideshows, each with a potentially false, yet seductive, secret within. For Contreras, her meticulously designed and machined pieces made of wood, mirror, vinyl and auto paint are an homage to her Chicano culture, especially the carefully crafted shapes and lustrous veneers of lowrider cars. As they are replicable CAD-designed wood, acrylic and vinyl pieces, she also views her full installations as prints. She embraces reproducible art, in part, because it is easily accessible like other widely available vernacular art forms. Like her lowrider counterparts, Contreras is a technician whose work can astonish and distract viewers from the dystopian landscape of their own creation.
Yet, while her work is skillfully machined and spraypainted to glimmer like the work of her forebears, she eschews Chicano art’s established iconography in favor of disjointed buildings in unpopulated human-made landscapes. While often depicting the exterior of houses, her work cannot be understood as a celebratory illustration of the domestic sphere. It is especially interesting to view her work via artist and critic Amalia Mesa-Bains’ feminist reinterpretation of Tomás Ybarra-Frausto’s concept of rasquachismo (a working class make-do sensibility) in Chicano art. In Domesticana: The Sensibility of Chicana Rasquache, Mesa-Bains says, “Critical to the strategy of domesticana is the quality of paradox. Moving past the fixation of a domineering patriarchal language, our domesticana is an emancipatory gesture of representational space and personal pose.” While Mesa-Bains employs a distinctly Chicana visual lexicon in her artwork, Contreras adapts her concepts of paradox to the literal representation of architectural space, examining the outer structure of our (societal) house.
Her Viewfinder series incorporates rhinestones, another reflective surface often used in Chicano artmaking, but also associated with feminine representations. Resisting an art school admonishment that, “glitter does not belong in art,” Contreras thoroughly bedazzled the faces of five classic view-finding toys with gleaming aquamarine stones. Inside, gifs of the crumbling human landscape flicker in and out on a loop. Her interest in paradox manifests between what is seen and not seen.
Evelyn Contreras, installation photos, Atkinson Gallery, SBCC
In another paradox, Contreras jokingly describes herself as “a stunted sculptor working planarly.” The tension between flat prints and three-dimensional objects is most evident in Suspension, a mash-up of shiny silver dodecahedron and a Rorschach test. It is a metaphor for the way viewers attempt to construct meaning from images they cannot decipher. At the center, is a gif, an obfuscated, kaleidoscope of refracting images of hurricane-destroyed homes from Rockport.
As in the work of other speculative futurists, Contreras depicts a prismatic gap of potential opened by the technological glitch of our present dystopian world. Through this crack, we get just a glimpse of a more physically present and more resplendently beautiful future.
Cover Image: Evelyn Contreras, Through the Looking Glass, detail
