MOTION DECONSTRUCTED EXHIBIT PRESENTED BY QUINTESSENTIALLY ART

I love my automobile..she is my life, my artistic and spiritual life..full of riches..she is more dear, more useful, more full of education than my library, where the closed books sleep on their spines, than my paintings, which hang dead on my walls all around me, with their immobile shy, tree, water and figures.. Octave Mirbeau, La 628-E8, 1908

Motion Deconstructed, curated by Gary Krimershmoys of Quintessentially Art, showcases the work of artists Indira Cesarine, Lawrence Heller, David Kramer, Oksana Mas, John Melville, Kimberly du Ross, and Aaron Young.

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.

Gary Krimershmoys felt the Classic Car Club was the ideal venue to show the physical link between art and cars, rather than the traditional white box of the gallery. The exhibit presented the works of the artists based on motion and the vehicle in particular juxtaposed against the shiny collectables in the showroom at the Classic Car Club.

XXXX Magazine’s Creative Director, Indira Cesarine, was invited to show several recent works in the exhibit, Including video art piece Bangkok High, 2010 and photographs Truck and Broom 2010, Truck and Birdcage, 2010.

At Motion Deconstructed, Indira’s photos take a probing look at vehicles in Thailand that became living sculptures, as their utility dwindled, and they are integrated into the detritus of those societies. The passion of striving for the automobile is counterbalances with the reality of dealing with the pollution that a car produces for the planet, and the junk that is left behind when it is no longer of use.

The video 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. In a juxtaposition to her the jarring photographic images of trucks left behind as junk that have melded into the city walls, the Bangkok High video evokes a hypnotic and surreal vision created out of the ordinary hum of traffic at night.

Aaron Young is a cross between a performance artist, an action painter and multi-disciplinary artist that works with videos, drawing, sculpture and photographs. His work shines a light on the world of the rebel, a macho misfit that exudes energy, and we as the audience view the carnage, beauty and grit after the performance. At Motion Deconstructed, we see a memento of just such a performance, in Moscow. The piece starts by painting aluminium panels that cover a floor, then having motorcycles do burn-out doughnuts on these panels to blaring music. What we have left is an abstract, coated, scraped panel, which is an Abstract Expressionist, layered recording of the event. The themes of motion, expression and what is considered art, are all encapsulated in the piece.

David Kramer is an artist that has been working for over 20 years in drawing, installations, and sculptures. Themes of memory, of reflecting on one’s life and a jaundiced look at the ever present and pervasive advertising, are some of the pillars of Kramer’s work. The empty promises and the feeling that the ‘goal’ is always out of reach form a familiar tone to the work, just as the words lacerate the dream and bring it back to reality. At Motion Deconstructed, David’s works reference old advertising images, where the car is the object of desire, and then injects his own satirical take on their intended message with word and image interplay. We see the automobile as one of the ultimate materialistic goals, while the words make you smile, think, and reflect on the questionable the underpinnings of the consumerist society. The installation of roadside signs, Free Kool Aide and Snake Oil also point to another balm for the theoretical traveller, a promise that they will find not as desired as expected or just out of reach. Their back is covered in writing that reads like psychoanalytic free flowing thoughts, that again leave a veil of frustration.

John Melville is an artist and musician, living in Brooklyn, NY. He has been working on both endeavours with a rigor and passion, which is seen in the delicate, detailed reworking of found or appropriated artistic material. At Motion Deconstructed, John works with postcard imagery that is nostalgic, harking back to the innocence and purity of bygone eras. Then he overlays the work with his graphical interpretations, abstracted forms that give texture and weight to the compositions, while bringing the images to a contemporary sensibility.

Kimberly Du Ross has incorporated many mediums into her ouvre, from directing movies, to abstract and realist painting. Du Ross studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and holds a Master’s degree in filmmaking from the Royal College of Art in London. Having lived between America and Europe for most of her life, the influences come from the environment, as well as constant exploration of what it is to be an artist. At Motion Deconstructed, we were be presenting The OBSESSED, a film about what happens when a repressed young man feels passion for the first time in his life and falls madly in love with a nude…in a painting. He also meets a girl whose greatest passion is her Mustang and the two embark on a mission to get his painting back. The movie stars Edward Tudor-Pole (of the Sex Pistols), and Simon de Pury and Eduardo Paolozzi have cameos. This is the first time the film was seen in the USA, last shown in the Royal College of Art in London in 1996.

Lawrence Saul Heller is an artist and architect, and his work shows the subtle melding of his two lifelong passions. Drawing on his education and experience, Heller creates multi-media, 3-dimentional sculptures that embody balance, harmony and representational abstraction. At Motion Deconstructed, Heller works in geometric abstraction, evoking motion, history and architectural concepts, in faux mechanical sculptures. The work shows influences of architecture, Heller’s collection of classic cars, Vespas, and historical exercises in abstraction. We can see traces of Futurists and Louise Nevelson in these abstract creations.

Oksana Mas is one of Ukraine’s foremost contemporary artists. She works in with sculptures, paintings and installations, looking for ways to delve into the spiritual and the universal in art. The BMW engine sculpture at Motion Deconstructed exudes a feminism and eroticism on a traditionally banal subject like an engine of a car. Wrapping the engine changes the characteristics and functionality of the piece, giving new life, a recycled life, to this object. This was a project consisting of 7 wrapped engines, with only 2 remaining unsold.