PEUGEOT AS PLANTER: Corcelle-Lippeveld’s Deux Chevaux Rouge A l’Aubier. |
A theme-and-variation art show can be a creativity catalyst for its artists as well as a straightforward way to hook viewers’ interest. Hera Gallery has presented several interesting ones over the years, from democracy under siege to people and places around the state. But few, if any, have offered as much glitz and substance as “Car Culture,” a juried exhibition (through July 8) that’s drawn 26 artists from 11 states around the country.What in contemporary life has been more fraught with diverse meanings? As a kandy-kolored tangerine-flake streamlined baby, a car is an object of worship; as an overpowered, gas-guzzling behemoth, it’s the epitome of shortsighted, materialistic excess. An artist can’t toss a paintbrush over a shoulder without landing on some aspect worth illustrating.
A good place to start viewing this show is with Birth of an Obsession, a mixed-media collage by Tony Nicholas. Quickly grabbing our attention in it is a snapshot of a toddler looking over his shoulder at us, standing in front of a screen that shows a driver’s-eye view of a speeding Formula 1 race car. Anyone looking to this exhibition for insights into our self-destructive national obsession with the internal combustion engine would nod at this reminder that we’re quite impressionable.
On the whole, “Car Culture” doesn’t come across as didactic, although the occasional angry point is made. Penny Mateer’s Make Me Gotta Holler is a quilt bordered with tourist destination spots such as the Empire State Building and the Golden Gate Bridge. One motif is pigs next to apples consumed down to their cores. In the center, surrounded by red convertibles like an honor guard, is a red, white, and blue ribbon emblazoned with a chipper “Let’s Pretend It’s All Okay.” Across the argument from irony is Stuart Larson’s photograph Issues of Environment, showing a car topped with an effigy of the president astride a missile. On the side of the car are head shots of the top administration figures, a label below describing them as “The Liars Club.”
Photographer Bart Parker juried the show, and fully a third of the artists here are photographers. The car in the foreground of Iris Falck Donnelly’s Jesus es mi Pastor becomes more significant in the context of the exhibition than of the picture. The title is emblazoned in capital letters across the dashboard, and the sun-bleached red car may be the most valuable thing in the shantytown behind it, somewhere in Latin America. The implication of the black-and-white photograph, Brian McDonald’s Shades of Easter Island, is made explicit by its title. The towering T-shape concrete support of a highway under construction rises from shadow, a solitary monolith that looks as awesome as a stone head — actually, a face can be discerned, an accident of the structure’s design. It’s an artifact of a civilization no less mysterious for being our own.
Even more imposing is the block of black-and-white photographs by Erik Gould, 20 Roadside Memorials. The four-by-five grid of horizontal images gives order to the aftermath of chaos: Teddy bears tied to a telephone pole, a victim’s favorite shirt, and many roadside crosses.
