News

Aug 02, 2023

Alejandro Contreras: In Work We Trust ¡Chamo, ¿qué hiciste con el carro?!

Alejandro Contreras’s In Work We Trust ¡Chamo, ¿qué hiciste con el carro?! at the ELM Foundation, his first solo exhibition in New York, is viscerally overwhelming. The sheer amount of material is

Alejandro Contreras’s In Work We Trust ¡Chamo, ¿qué hiciste con el carro?! at the ELM Foundation, his first solo exhibition in New York, is viscerally overwhelming. The sheer amount of material is difficult to process. Behind a sliced-open wall of yellow gypsum board and metal studs lay the desecrated body of his broken down 2000 white Jeep Cherokee, barely recognizable, its components strewn outwards, with seats positioned at broken angles, the grate once attached to the roof cast behind it, the roof leaning off kilter against the wall. Most of its windshield is gone, the remains of the glass cut along a curve. In Work We Trust is an installation that seems to exist on an environmental scale, entropic and apocalyptic while also distinctly gestural, the car moving from a closed fist to a flat palm. In the chaos it’s hard to distinguish between what is an intervention into the old boiler room and what isn’t—a complete mergence of site and creation.

At the center of the installation, the car’s engine is connected to the metal structure above, ascendant on chains like a butchered animal. It is no longer a part of the car but becoming its own object. Above the engine and behind it are large water storage tanks that originally connected to an industrial boiler. Altered by Contreras for the installation, his carvings into these tanks mirror forms seen elsewhere in the exhibit: the lower left is incised with the cylinders of butane tanks, the gypsum board’s concentric circles are replicated in the topmost tank’s outer layer.

Having worked in museums and galleries and fairs as an art handler for over a decade, Contreras is familiar with the rapid pace of the art world and the continuous fabrication and destruction of the temporary architecture that supports it. By cutting into the gypsum board he reveals the internal supports not typically visible, positioning the wall as foreground rather than background, turning it into the portal through which you view the piece.

The image of concentric circles within a square repeats throughout Contreras’s practice. It takes inspiration from the work of Jesús Soto and Gego, and from the playgrounds of Caracas, where Contreras is from. As a child, he would play with his friends on the city’s large works of modernist public art, climbing onto and over them. While viewing In Work We Trust I had the opportunity to enter the installation. Inside, stepping carefully over discarded plastic and metal, the work shifting beneath me, I thought of sculpture as playground, of climbing onto the large concrete triangles of Federico Silva’s Espacio Escultórico (1979) in Mexico City and over the brightly colored steel beams along the paths of the surrounding sculpture park; I thought of exploring the buildings on my grandparent’s farm and the times I’ve walked through the destruction left by tornadoes or hurricanes.

At the opening there was a constant sound of moving water, coming from the hose Contreras placed on the installation’s floor, which eventually flooded the room, the water flowing over the wooden platform. The hose was detached, but the pool of water is still visible, now mixed with oil, wheat-pasted posters, and a large pile of old and unused nails. Throughout the summer the installation has melted and coalesced, getting stickier, making it harder to distinguish one layer from the next. It was only while inside of the work that the level of intention applied and its individual components became clear: Contreras’s shattered plexiglass line work tucked under car parts and hanging on each wall, the lighting placed beneath the body of the car, how the pipes are almost reflective, coated in fresh paint.

In Work We Trust centers on labor, asking what aspects of it are valued, visible and not, providing a reflection on the labor of the artist, artworker, and maker, beginning with Contreras’s experience working on cars in Caracas and Miami during his youth. It considers value not only in material terms but expansively, on the level of how it is constructed and regarded individually and communally. In Work We Trust is extreme in its nature, fitting for the second half of the work’s title, ¡Chamo, ¿qué hiciste con el carro?!, which is Caracas slang used amongst close friends, spoken with the full body postured in disbelief, loosely translating to Dude!! What have you done with the car?!, as in: Are you crazy, or just plain insane?

Caitlin Anklam is a contributor to the Brooklyn Rail.