Back to the Future, 2025
Woodcut on Hahnemühle 300gsm
78.5 x 56 cm
Edition of 6
R 12,000.00 (Framed)
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Process
This is the Way the World Ends is a series of four woodcuts made in reference to/ playing off a wooden TV sculpture, No News is Good News, I produced in 2024. While working at Loft Editions, Georgina Berens suggested the TV screen as a conceptual and compositional frame for the print series.
Luca Evans carving at Loft Editions.
Carved block for ‘Back to the Future’.
A lot of my work plays with ideas around failure and obsolescence, using old technology as a motif/ sounding board. I’ve made TVs, radios, corded phones, cassettes, VHS tapes. I enjoy the dysfunction of plastic and metal technologies carved into wood. Nothing works.
At Loft Editions every ink colour is mixed by hand for printing.
Blend roll for the flame in ‘Toy Story’.
The boxy TV that I associate with my 1990s - 2000s childhood is a particularly animated playground for dysfunction. The TV is a glitchy portal in time and space, uncurated by algorithm, broken with static. I have an archive of disjointed TV memories: twin towers crashing on 9/11, Takalani Sesame, 7de Laan, Disney movies, Pokemon, presidential elections, that late night movie on eTV. The TV jumped between reality and unreality. A site to witness disaster, then flip the channel and watch cartoons. My dad would call: “come watch, Jacque Kallis is breaking a world record”. Carte Blanche would sound the end of the weekend.
Luca Evans carving at Loft Editions.
TV plate for printing.
I could have kept making innumerable screens (TV is infinite), but we stopped at four. I hoped to create a sense of disjuncture jumping from screen to screen. The title is a reference to a T.S. Elliot line: “this is the way the world ends- not with a bang but a whimper”. With its growing obsolescence, the collective watching of the family box TV has swam into more solitary, curated algorithms. But some things still feel the same, watching the end of the world spliced between cartoons and cooking shows, flicking the channels, faster and faster.
Luca Evans working on the carved ‘glitch’ image.
And the print from the same plate for the piece ‘Space Jam’.
Biography
Luca Evans photographed by Gerhardt Coetzee.
Luca Evans is a Cape Town-based artist working primarily with wood and text. They utilise a hit-and-miss experimental approach to woodwork. Their ‘pop-ish’ work plays with ideas around language, failure, mishap, technology, violence, nostalgia and humour. Text and object are assembled interchangeably. Luca’s practice employs a cut and paste approach. They work with marquetry, an archaic woodworking method in which thin pieces of wood are assembled like jigsaw puzzles. While working predominantly in wood, they also experiment with print, publication and found objects.
Luca has a background in Linguistics (graduating from the University of Cape Town in 2018) and their interdisciplinary practice spans artmaking, education, writing and curation. In 2022 they co-founded Under Projects, an artist-run experimental project space where they worked as a curator and programmer for two years. They also lecture part-time in Conceptual and Curatorial practice.
They have participated in a number of group exhibitions locally and internationally. They are represented by Everard Read Cape Town.
Luca has a background in Linguistics (graduating from the University of Cape Town in 2018) and their interdisciplinary practice spans artmaking, education, writing and curation. In 2022 they co-founded Under Projects, an artist-run experimental project space where they worked as a curator and programmer for two years. They also lecture part-time in Conceptual and Curatorial practice.
They have participated in a number of group exhibitions locally and internationally. They are represented by Everard Read Cape Town.