America loves its cars. There's just something about that lime green station wagon's wood paneling that evokes a certain nostalgia - or, at the very least, brings Greg Brady to mind.
For Rosemarie Fiore, a visiting faculty member in the McIntire Department of Art, the automobile goes beyond drive-ins, Route 66 and backseat sibling rivalry. In her new Fayerweather Gallery exhibit, "Body Shop," Fiore explores the automobile's essence in a series of works that illustrate the inner and outer character of a true cultural artifact.
Artistic representations of cars are nothing new. It is the way in which Fiore presents her artwork that gives the exhibit its edge. In the tradition of pop artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg (Fiore cites the latter as an influence), the artist uses ordinary subject matter in an unconventional way to provoke an audience response.
"Body Shop" is a series of mixed media pieces made with car parts. Using materials such as motor oil, transmission fluid and coolant, Fiore transferred the inner components of a vehicle onto a visual representation of the same object.
The most common image in the exhibit is a rear windshield. Fiore used an apparatus designed specifically to produce her artwork for the showing. This device allowed Fiore to make the rear windshield image by covering her Subaru wagon in plastic and forming an image on top of a print with a windshield wiper. The wiper transferred the oils onto a windshield-shaped paper cutout to produce a semi-circular variation in color on the print's foreground. The fragile fan-like shape serves as a sharp contrast to the industrial feel of the piece's remaining substance. The contrast was no accident as Fiore described her efforts as a means of using "an aggressive machine to create delicate and beautiful work."
In several of her pieces, Fiore uses materials outside of the car's engine to represent the vehicle. Graphite rubbings such as "Subaru Skin" and "Subaru Engine" provide a more childlike presentation of the car aesthetic. Hoping to convey the humor behind her exhibit, Fiore uses graphite rubbings such as those used by children to draw over coins as a way to illustrate different parts of her Subaru wagon. She sees the images as "serious work done in a humorous state of mind." "Subaru Skin" presents front, rear and side angles as a full view of the car's surface area. One of the piece's purposes is to show the history and personality of the car by displaying its dents and imperfections.
"Subaru Engine" explains the engine in the form of a map-like graphite rubbing.
A more humorous piece is "Subaru Test Drive," which uses a wide variety of materials that Fiore ran over with her car, ranging from the fittingly shaped wagon wheel pasta to a Jane Fonda workout tape. This long, more concrete piece is a layered fusion of material roadkill. Different victims of the car's wheels form a collage of crushed debris.
Fiore said she expects the exhibit to demonstrate the role of the automobile in American society. She chose the Subaru because she believed it to be "representative of the middle class American family. If I had made the work with a Mercedes it wouldn't have represented where I was coming from," she said.
The exhibit will run until Oct. 29 in the Fayerweather Gallery. Fiore will give a presentation on her work at 5:30 p.m. tonight in Campbell Hall Room 160.
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