Donald Guevara 

Slidin' Dance

*FINALIST*

A diverse upbringing that included German-American, Congolese, and Honduran cultures allowed for an early introduction into contradiction, change, and miscegenation or amalgamation, and the complexities of race and gender drive the work that I create. When making, I meticulously sculpt layered collage-based works of drawings, found objects, and video to create vignettes and portals into the experience or state of mind that is attached to being within the “in-between” or occupying the space of the AFK (away from keyboard) Glitch. Images are selected from commercial or socially driven images, cut apart, and reformulated to create a new image that holds a code and context away from, yet still inherently attached, to the original images. This fusing and melting circumvents the original and gains agency and autonomy as being separate but not separated. Conceptions of the body, gender performativity, race and racial codes, language, and other aspects typically used to compartmentalize the individual are dealt with through the idea of decision making through incision making; slicing oneself into the greater conversation by remixing the original images. Limbs, some of the most difficult parts of the body to code through the lens of gender, twist, wrap, and overlap each other and in this dance is often the display of contradictory bodies and settings superimposed and cut together to become a new whole; the cyborg of cultural mixture in new virtualized arena.

By constructing a collaged board that acts as the skeleton for the pieces, one can take cheap materials and slowly evolve into a hyperglossed product that is beautiful but brittle, strong yet fragile from the right force. Resin is used to bind as much as it is to separate through matter the various layers of the piece, harkening to the construction of one’s identity. After an initial art object collage is made through the selection and incision of commercial and socially driven images and subsequent decision to place them, I then scan and digitally manipulate a glitch into the piece. This becomes a journey from a constructed image, to an AFK collage, to a digitized glitch that has evolved in the fourth dimension away from the confines of the expected.

“Slidin’ Dance,” is composed of three layers of resin, wood, and paper. Limbs, colors, and species collide through the glitch into a landscape warped by the digital cityscape on the edge.