EVIDENCE OF US
Solo Exhibition at the San Bernardino County Museum
May 9 to September 6, 2026
EXHIBITION ESSAY BY SHANA NYS DAMBROT
E. Tyler Burton’s Evidence of Us
In the inventive, all-consuming works of art throughout Evidence of Us, E. Tyler Burton presents a rigorous archaeology of the immediate present, transforming the debris of contemporary life into an immersive, site-specific ledger of the Anthropocene—a record of what we leave behind, reimagined through a lens of obsessive handmade labor and formal transfiguration. If, as author Zygmunt Bauman wrote in Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts, “There is no such thing as a 'disposable' object…We live in a world crowded by the ghosts of our own convenience, waiting to be rediscovered as the artifacts of who we were,” then it is up to artists like Burton to give emotional form to these ghosts, so that they may be confronted—and perhaps, exorcized.
The power of Burton’s practice lies in the tension between the sheer, staggering volume of her salvaged, diverted materials and the intense, sensory intimacy of her intervention. In Haste Couture, a 12x16-foot chamber constructed from compressed thrift-store clothing, the weight of global "fast fashion" becomes a literal architectural force—the domestic as a dominion. Similarly, Synthetic Bloom—composed of more than 400 milk jugs salvaged from the daily rush of a local Starbucks—utilizes a repetitive, manual assembly and delicate technology to mimic biological respiration. “The archaeological record of our age is being written in the unyielding language of polymers,” writes Jan Zalasiewicz in The Earth After Us. “We are the first generation to leave behind a fossil record that is both synthetic and indestructible—a testament to a culture that mastered the art of making, but forgot the art of vanishing.” As such, these are not merely assemblages; they are acts of endurance with an unlikely dimension of the soul, gestural objects that mirror the scale of the crises they address.
Burton achieves a delicate alchemical balance, as her forlorn materials are lyrically elevated into high-art objects, yet stubbornly remain as their humble selves. We see the blossoms but we never lose sight of the discarded plastic; we see the sculptural strata, but the memory of the garment remains. This refusal to fully disguise her medium forces a confrontation with the object’s history, pulling the viewer into a psychological space where the seductive beauty of the form is inextricably linked to an indictment of its origin and our implication in a toxic cycle of desire. By framing these artifacts of consumption through botanical histories and geological timelines, Burton invites us to view our own waste as future fossils and marvel at the permanence of our temporary choices. The exhibition ultimately functions as a mending of the psyche, asking what it means to live in a world where our most disposable moments constitute our most lasting legacy.
—Shana Nys Dambrot
Sourced used clothing, sewn with a 1966 Singer sewing machine inherited from my grandmother, forms a large "screen" for an abstract video of garments tumbling in slow motion inside a dryer. The vibrant colors of the clothing create a deceptive beauty, masking the darker reality of the fast fashion cycle. The accompanying sounds — a haunting blend of ker-klunk, scraping, and squealing, serve as an ominous commentary on the industry’s relentless churn.
Strata: Evidence of Us begins with existing concrete fossil slices embedded with discarded plastic and other everyday materials. These physical sculptures are photographed and enlarged into a 10 × 16-foot projection, transforming the objects into a shifting geological record. Motion sensors and custom software respond to each viewer, causing the image to fragment, pixelate, and change as they move through the space. Recorded sounds of crushing plastic water bottles emerge with their proximity. Each presence leaves a temporary trace, briefly altering the projected surface before it settles again.