The Auto Show - Chris Labrooy, Julie Libersat, Karl Unnasch & Erwin Wurm
Chris Labrooy’s Auto Elasticity (Computer Generated Graphics)
The exhibit consisted of both loaned and commissioned works by nationally & internationally-renowned artists that explore the form of the automobile and the imaginative qualities of construction and movement through ideas of transportation. The Auto Show helped mark the 10th anniversary of the non-profit Greenway Conservancy’s care and management of The Greenway by leading visitors to reflect on the former elevated Central Artery and the history of site as a transportation corridor. The exhibition featured engaging works in a wide variety of media that explore the ways in which our automobiles and highways reflect our communal history, values, and perceptions of the world, including:
No Direction, Julie Libersat
Through the concepts of navigation, transportation, and belonging, Libersat’s work explores the human relationship with the built environment. It reflects on the ways that our experience navigating and inhabiting architecture and public space is mediated through layers of cultural and personal meaning that shape our relationship and behavior within the man-made landscape.
No Direction is inspired by the patterns and symbols in street markings and highway signs and explores our relationship with the symbolism of the automobile and road. The totemic stacked signs in No Direction are activated by the wind, which rotates each layer of sign like a windmill. The signs have no markings; they are in motion yet they provide no direction for transportation. The reflective material is activated at night by the reflected light from passing vehicles and street lamps. Pedestrians and drivers are invited to reconsider their physical engagement with navigation and orientation and the everyday landscape encountered in transit.
UFO, Erwin Wurm
Erwin Wurm’s sculptures can often be seen as a reflection of modern society. Cars become fat to exaggerate their function as a status symbol. Vehicles such as cars are a recurring theme in Wurm’s work. The UFO which was made from a Porsche 924 is one example. The vehicle‘s form has been destroyed and reshaped in a bizarre way. It appears strangely and without function, while at the same time signaling speed and movement. The artist makes use of everyday objects and displays them in an unusual form to give the viewer a different view on the reality.
Computer Generated Graphics, Chris Labrooy
An outdoor photo exhibit featuring hyper-real impossible compositions of twisting and contorting vintage vehicles by Scottish computer-generated image artist Chris Labrooy.
His impossible compositions are odd and alluring because they appear hyper-real, though every single pixel is meticulously 3-D-modeled, using photographs only for reference. “Nothing is meant to be deliberately deceiving, but that’s a function of the craftsmanship and the hours and hours of experimentation that go into this,” says Labrooy.
Labrooy fashions new ways for us to experience the cars we love, challenging us by changing their known forms but not their emblematic environments. Think of them like digital snow globes he can shake up and play with on a whim.”
Operant (An Oldowonk Cataract), Karl Unnasch
Unnasch’s contribution to “The Auto Show” – titled OPERANT (An Oldowonk Cataract) – was a three-dimensional stained-glass-accoutered artwork based on a red dump truck that acknowledges and celebrates the construction workers and laborers who help build our beautiful cities, bridges and park systems. Backlit stained-glass panels installed in the cab windows and along the sides of the dump box contain imagery suggestive of the continuum of concepts influencing the human-built environment.
The foundations for problem-solving are innate; hence, the panels depict various forms of Nature’s approach to ‘building’ and ‘making’. Yet, subtly threaded throughout the imagery, whispers of heuristics and artificial intelligence hint at the contemporary end of the spectrum. Finally, a cascade of backlit chunk glass – reminiscent of flinty, primordial tools – has the appearance of being dumped out from the back of the truck, eliciting the possibilities of design and construction.
