Meme #3 Climate Change 2020

Cuevas perceives memes as self-reflective of society and as an unfiltered cultural language that parallels graffiti and street art. For this public intervention, Cuevas fills the skeletal space of antiquated communication, the phone booths, with this contemporary digital language. The works embody an analog expression as unique prints. This clash of two eras is a jarring juxtaposition between past and present. They reveal the irrelevance of the phone booth to current urban communication in the age of personal smartphones as well as the shifts in a globalized culture’s visual vocabulary. Cuevas utilizes tactics shared by memes and advertising, namely subverting aesthetic elements with ironic text. The compositions are a gesture towards offline participation and pair whimsical aesthetics with comical political messages about capitalism, climate change denial, and vitriolic media. By using the historical scaffolding of printed communications Cuevas promulgates an example of visual culture acknowledging the mostly unexplored emotional landscape behind social media and the rise of internet culture.

Cuevas’s ongoing views on ecology are also reflective of internet trends that favor expressive animals. A pensive gorilla or grumpy cat transcend human identity politics making them widely relatable while overlaying both humor and criticism to everyday woes. In the artists’ words, a “viral meme replicates natural selection” in that the funniest become the most prevalent. Meme’s act as the antithesis to the fixed, self-serving advertising industry centered on controlling one unique message. They establish an expectation of constant change, untethered to their origin, as they mutate and spread. A well-crafted meme holds the potential to be explosive and viral-like COVID and the current conditions of everyday life.