Bugs Bunny Behind a Mesophile Bush

2020 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

105 x 75 cm

Paloma Contreras Lomas

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Paloma Contreras Lomas sometimes incorporates large scale drawing into her practice. For Contreras, drawing is a deeply personal and corporeal exercise that she relates to writing and narration. Her charcoal drawing Bugs Bunny Behind a Mesophile Bush features a gigantic hat providing shelter to the simultaneously identifiable and unidentifiable cartoon character hiding behind a wild bus. This work relates to Contreras’s soft sculpture Cimarrón not only in its iconography, but also in that both works fall into a lineage of Mexican artists, such as Rubén Ortiz Torrez or Minerva Cuevas, that have addressed identity issues by exploring the political role of mass media and popular culture.

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A writer and an artist, Paloma Contreras Lomas has developed a practice in which literature and fiction play a major role, allowing her to address a series of topics regarding race and class that are rarely broached by a traditional Mexican society. Positioning herself as operating from a feminine condition rather than a feminist stand, the artist claims her right to confront those particular political issues that have historically been associated with male libido, such as the relationship between nationalism and the occupation and instrumentalization of territory, and the further inscription of an extractive global economy. From that perspective, Contreras’s work seems to inscribe itself as the next logical step after the 1990’s activist take of artists like Minerva Cuevas, giving a much broader context to those very same issues as she reframes them at point in (Mexican) history in which gender violence, and the voices against it, have reached a peak. The artist’s amalgamation of narrative, film, performance, drawing, and sculpture offers alternative approaches to address social urgencies from a very personal, and sometimes autobiographical, perspective. Contreras is also a part of the Mexican artist collective Bikini Wax, formed in 2011. Bikini Wax founded an artist-run space whose undertakings have been characterized by a multidisciplinary and pedagogical approach to art.

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Colors:

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• cartoon.n.01
• landscape.n.01
• identity.n.01
• medium.n.01
• culture.n.01
• monochrome