photographer / director / publisher
[slidepress gallery=’motion-deconstructed-exhibit’]
MOTION DECONSTRUCTED EXHIBIT PRESENTED BY QUINTESSENTIALLY ART
I was asked by Quintessentially Art’s founder, Gary Krimershmoys, to exhibit some of my recent video art and photography in his new show, Motion Deconstructed, at New York’s Classic Car Club. The group show, which opened on June 9th, presented the works of several well known contemporary artists, including Lawrence Heller, David Kramer, Oksana Mas, John Melville, Kimberly du Ross, and Aaron Young. The theme of the show was quite a departure from the work I am known for, as it centralized around the automobile.
As the curator Gary put it: ”Art and the automobile are two of the most luxurious, aspirational and divisive objects in humanity’s recent history. At the Motion Deconstructed show, we would like to invite you to take a contemporary look at what art can say about the automobile’s place in a modern society. Motion Deconstructed deals with the myriad of ways society fetishizes the beauty of the car, uses it as a status symbol and makes it one of the primary materialistic goals of people’s labours, but without bypassing its dark side as a clogger of streets and junkyards. Here you will not find traditional scenes in automotive art depicting race cars going around racetracks or shining as they park on a well manicured lawn. The themes of beauty and banality that are present in automobiles, juxtaposed with the auto-exotica in the Club, should make the viewer question what the connection of art and the mechanized society in motion means.”
The photographs and video I presented in the exhibit were from my recent trip to Bangkok. Video art film Bangkok High shows a blur of the modern cosmopolitan city, where movement at night envelops the viewer in a cacophony of light and fleeting images. The visuals of traffic are transformed to create an orchestra of light that become a dance of order and chaos. The video evokes a hypnotic and surreal vision created out of the ordinary hum of traffic at night. The 2 photographs i have in the exhibit are a complete contrast to the video. They depicted vehicles that were left behind as junk to become part of the city walls. In the inner city I was struck by how the locals used these discarded vehicles to actually create walls for their work spaces and homes. Piled with debris, they are left behind to become almost living sculptures. They are on 1 hand grotesque images of the debris of our society and images of pollution created by mass consumption, and on the other hand in a strange way almost romantic in their distraught state.
Exhibit Open to the Public June 9 – July 14
12-7pm Monday – Friday
Location: Classic Car Club, 250 Hudson Street, NYC