C.B. Evans – Reality or Not

C.B. Evans’s practice engages with the infrastructures that hold contemporary life. Rather than approaching these structures through abstraction or alienation, their films, installations, sculptures, and collages turn toward the intimate terrain of human emotions, examining its value and inevitable rebellion as it comes into contact with ideological, physical, and technological structures. Their work seizes on the points where emotions falter, push back, or find new form in the face of such forces. Drawing on a collage of animation techniques, staged live action, and found footage, Evans’s films place storytelling at their core. Politics, literature, cinema, and popular culture serve as entry points into speculative narratives. Reality or Not follows a group of high school students from a suburb north of Paris who are invited by an American producer to participate in a reality TV show only to reject reality itself. The students’ radicalization is pushed by the Producer (C.B. Evans) and narrated by their former teacher (Alexandra Stewart), as they begin a practice of world jumping that moves the film across disparate realities. Alongside this group of young people, an eclectic cast of characters negotiates interwoven storylines: a former Real Housewives star turned hacker attempting to bring down the International Monetary Fund; an anti-imperialist statue enraged by its own status; an anti-universe; and a workers’ collective made up of failed virtual influencer renders. The 35-minute film at Schinkel Pavillon is lodged with penetrating humor to deliver incisive observations of contemporary culture. Seductive images and the layering of familiar references and sounds are deployed as a vital foil to the barrage of ideas, inviting audiences to release into possibilities of the many realities unfolding. “No you, no me, no storylines”.