CAR SHOW
Iris Fraser-Gudrunas
Kelly Jazvac
Charlene K. Lau
Cameron Lee
Alvin Luong
Jon Sasaki
Liana Schmidt

September 1 - October 1, 2022
Reception: Thursday, September 8th, 6-9pm

Through the sunroof, two hands reach in unison for the night sky, cigarettes loosely balanced between their fingers. You can just make out the tiny fires as they smoulder, inches above the moving car’s glinting shell. The scene, from Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s film Drive My Car (2021), is an intimate moment between not two, but three of the stirring road movie’s protagonists: a grieving theatre director, his driver, and a fire-engine-red Saab 900 Turbo—in my eyes, the film’s true star.

Cars have a way of stealing the show. Cars chasing cars, cars exploding, cars that seem to fly as they roar and bound through streets, somehow always landing quite unscathed. These over-the-top actions don’t tend to have much of a narrative drive in movies or TV, but they’re nevertheless iconic. They chronicle the mythos of the machine as something fast and flashy; in the case of the seductive red Saab, it’s a sanctuary, too, a space that’s distinctly separate from the outside, too sacred for certain vices.

We all have some sort of car fever, as the seven artists in CAR SHOW assert. Each has absorbed the automotive propaganda from media like car commercials, sci-fi tales, and cartoons, and deliver us more complicated, generous visions. Their works are entangled in nostalgia and desire but they rally at the same time around a wariness of this motor culture, with its machismo and muscle cars, and the glamorous, false assurances of hot wheels that gleefully spin us toward freedom until we run out of overpriced gas. As Kelly Jazvac’s sleek makeover of a 1998 Pontiac Sunfire coupe asks: What is the real value of these vehicles? Her work, Upgrade (2007), dresses the old car in vinyl wrap to resemble a Porsche 911, selling us power that’s just skin deep, if only for a moment. In another alchemic act, Jon Sasaki had a crew in Detroit perform surgery on a stretch limousine to create a shorter sedan. Rightsized Limo (2015) dissected and downsized a thing of excess, throwing down its doors for all to enter.

Getting behind the wheel can be a rush, and even more so after a pandemic-induced lockdown. But our urban fetishes also revolve around sheer aesthetics and the allure of pimping one’s ride. Charlene K. Lau cruises down this sweet fantasy through wallpaper that realizes her childhood wish for a car-themed bedroom, while Cameron Lee bequeaths their younger self a T-shirt that celebrates their once clandestine obsession with cars. Elsewhere, Iris Fraser-Gudrunas’s tarot cards position the evocative bodies of cars as prompts for introspection, and in Liana Schmidt’s Bow (2022), the car is not even there. Instead, we get a comically sized bow—an invitation to conjure our own custom, gift-wrapped wheels.

What is the cost of our outsized car dreams? Turbo (2017–18) a road film by Alvin Luong, confronts the losses in pursuit of levelling up in late capitalism. Watching his volatile acceleration of commodity fetishism, I recall driving down a Chicago highway a few years ago and passing a Toyota on fire. Flames engulfed the hood, sending noxious plumes into the night. The abandoned blaze was a scene straight out of a movie, only it was real.

Text by Claire Voon