Works by Juan Downey and Liz Cohen installed

Juan Downey, Video Trans Americas, 1973-76 (left); Liz Cohen, Trabantimino, 2002-10 (right)

A pioneering figure in video art, Juan Downey was attracted to the medium due to the real-time immediacy of its closed circuits combined with the innumerable possibilities it offered for playback and feed back. One of Downey's most ambitious video-feedback works is Video Trans Americas. Between 1973 and 1976, he embarked on three successive journeys that took him from New York to Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile, during which he recorded the autochthonous culture of each place, employing a documentary style and focusing on the landscape and the people-their architecture, language, and daily activities. He would then show these videos to the inhabitants of each place, and to others he met further along the trip, positioning himself as a "cultural communicant." VTA is perhaps one of Downey's most ideologically engaged works; he saw the act of playing back the images of one culture in the context of another, and playing back a single culture in its own context, as an instrument of politics. The act of communication in Video Trans Americas positions information as action, connecting and empowering the communities that Downey encountered during his expedition through the experience of video-feedback.
Text written by Curator Julieta González for the exhibition catalog.

For nearly twelve years, Liz Cohen has been making art with a car. Her works speak of cultural identification, gender stereotypes, and the enduring allure of the road. Her project Bodywork began in 2002, when she purchased an East German Trabant in Berlin and brought it to Detroit, where she lives and works. Over the course of many years, and with the help of several mentors across the country, Cohen became a master mechanic and began to modify her car. After eight years of bodywork-complete with hydraulics, new parts, paint, and chrome-she transformed her humble Trabant into Trabantimino, a hybridized car that merges the Trabant with a Chevrolet El Camino.

Cohen's Trabantimino contains parts of both iconic cars and design elements that express essential qualities of each. The car's small frame and beige body read as a Trabant, yet when the hydraulics on the interior fully extend the vehicle, it boasts brightly chromed American details and the length of an El Camino. In conjunction with the extensive body modification necessary to create her automotive kinetic sculpture, Cohen took on the modification of her own body in the fashion of a bikini-clad car show model. This led to a series of photographs in which she mimics a pinup model posing with the car at various stages of its transformation. In these images, Cohen manipulates conflates gender stereotypes by asserting herself as both mechanic and model.
In a natural next step, Cohen entered her car in the annual lowrider festival, Española, 2014. In addition to earning a special recognition award, Trabantiminio won first place in the Compact Radical category, a prize awarded to a car with seven or more body modifications. From its modest East German beginnings, Trabantimino has achieved the ultimate cultural infiltration, while aiding its maker in her ongoing work to destabilize persistent gender roles and cultural stereotypes.
Text written by Curator Irene Hofmann for the exhibition catalog.