Chris Wright Evans: Cathedrals of our time
Chris Wright Evans (1991) is an artist interested in the way people relate to objects, place, and generate reality through photography. In 2013, he graduated from St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, and moved to New York City where he lived and worked until 2017. During that time Evans printed for photographer Joel Meyerowitz, and retouched for Droga5, and Urban Print and Motion. In 2016 a portfolio of Evans’ work received honorable mention from Juror Mickalene Thomas, at the Baxter Street Camera Club Of New York. His photographs have been exhibited across the United States and have been featured in print and online. In 2018 and 2019, he was a finalist for the Contemporary Art Dealers of Dallas Project Fund, and later that year began curating a DIY digital art and video gallery, 153b, from his studio window. Evans received his MFA from the University of North Texas in the spring of 2020.
RR: Hey Chris. Could you start by giving us alittle background on your photography and artistic process.
CWE: Before formally studying photography, I was on my way to becoming a fully degreed geographer. Not only for my love of mountains and rivers, but because I am fascinated by the idea people and culture are influenced by the landscape in which they live. I started studying photography in my second year of college, and my earliest photographs were staged portraits and landscapes. Then, like now, I was interested by how images could shape our perspective and influence our experiences. I think this prolonged interest was informed by my geography coursework.
The ideas for my projects come from a combination of research and experimentation with different imaging techniques in the studio. Cathedrals of our time was made by weaving together several different typological projects. Each one connecting, at least tangentially, to the highway trying to illustrate the road as a device that constructs perspective. These disparate images are brought together to form the project.
RR: This series, Cathedrals of our time, could be considered an investigation of the American road trip. How did you begin this work and what drove your inspiration? No pun intended.
CWE: Cathedrals of our time was born directly from my project Cultural Heritage, about the performance, staging, and commercial absurdity at tourist sites around the United States. I was halfway in between Los Angeles and Las Vegas making some of the last pictures for Cultural Heritage when I realized that the staging of the tourist site did not stop at the parking lot, but that the trip and the highway were already shaping my perspective and interests. The following winter I began making my first images of the highway, thinking about the interstate as a passage for pilgrimage, and as a destination in and of itself. My first images in the project were produced using a long exposure technique that prevented fast moving cards from being captured by my camera in the middle of the day. Conceptually these long exposure pictures describe the critique of the interstate / america that the project elucidates. The highway allows for a certain kind of privilege to overlook the landscape and the people in it. The road shapes our relationship to place. Often our first glimpses of cities are framed by our windshields, and the highway funnels us to our destinations, and neighborhoods and people slip into our periphery.
The bulk of the photographs for the project were made during an 8000 mile road trip that took me around the US: from El Paso to Brownsville across the Texas Mexico Border, Through the South from Selma to Montgomery, North through Birmingham and St. Louis, and to the Northern limit of IH 35 to Duluth MN and Thunder Bay Canada.
RR: Did you find anything along the way that you did or did not expect?
CWE: I spent the most time on the highway during my month long road trip where I slept in the back of my car in Walmart parking lots, and at public campsites. I saw a hot air balloon race in Longview, Texas, I had a really excellent salmon and wasabi sandwich in Duluth, and stumbled into the Des Moines Art Center, one of my top museum experiences.
I wasn’t prepared for the loneliness of the highway, and the feeling of waking up in a new city everyday, having to remind myself where I had parked the night before. I began to feel as if I was blending into the highway, becoming anonymous in the shade beneath underpasses. There were times where I felt that I had slipped into the collective periphery of the highway, in a way where my presence had been normalized into the landscape along with the persistent drone of tires and motors. I did not always expect to see the people and landscapes that I often overlook at 70 mph, nor did I expect the same to happen to me. These realizations forced me to slow my process down as I made photographs, and carried over as I was making the final edits for the project.
RR: What was the role that Texas played along the lengthy endeavour? How did it shape your view of it? Its contrast throughout the rest of the places you visited.
CWE: Cathedrals of our time began as a project about IH 35, and as a way to illustrate the highway as a barometer for the american condition and culture at large, and because IH 35 divides East and West Texas, the lone star state provides the foundation of the character for the project. Even the title is borrowed from the movie True Stories, inspired by small Texas town newspaper articles, where it is coyly suggested that the interstate system amounts to the same grandeur of great medieval and renaissance architecture — an idea I sometimes entertain to be true.
Ironically, Texas is one of the few states that allows for private companies to maintain and repair the interstates. Interestingly Texas is home to one of the most treacherous stretches of interstate I have ever traversed. The markers of construction, detours, and narrow lanes set an expectation of tense driving on IH 35, that was only matched by traffic in Minneapolis at the Northern extreme of the highway.
RR: I think Cathedrals of our Time is very distinct among the genre of American Road Trip photography. Like you mentioned, even your title carries a kind of marbling of this experience, yet seems to pull back the curtain to it. What do you hope the series can reveal?
CWE: The road trip has been romanticized as an American tradition that invites thoughts of roadside attractions, beef jerky and inexpensive lodging. The road trip has been memorialized and repeatedly acted out from Jack Keroac to Harold and Kumar. It is formulaic and repeatable. I am hoping to show the discrepancy that exists within the idea of the road trip, the landscape and the American dream at large.
RR: Do you think the American roadtrip is accessible to everyone?
CWE: Every trip in the car is technically a road trip, i.e. a trip on a road, but we insist on idealizing the open road for its promise to deliver the unknown or to create a transcendent experience. The road trip in this sense relates to the American Dream as they are both mythical and aspirational. I think aspects of the American road trip are accessible to everyone. I would like to think that you are engaging with the tradition of the road trip when you drive down the highway at sunset with the radio tuned exactly right, or maybe when you stop for a bathroom break at an unfamiliar gas station. The road trip is about being open to new possibilities and a willingness to be hypnotized by the dashed lines and fast food that zoom past your field of view just above the speed limit. Aspects of the road trip are accessible on a daily basis, take the wrong exit and try it out.
RR: That’s a great way to put it. I never thought my trips between Dallas and Fort Worth could be considered road trips but they certainly feel so. Care to share anything else about the work?
CWE: I am proud of Cathedrals of our Time, but I am still working on the project. It is a lot of fun to make these photographs, I love spending time driving, looking and photographing. Over the course of this project my relationship to the United States has changed, and consequently I become aware of different aspects of the landscape to photograph. I am working on an edit of Cathedrals of our Time that can be realized as a photobook with a layout and sequence that will help dovetail the many tangents that run through the project.
RR: Thanks Chris!