Art collective MSCHF is at it again, this time with Lexus. For their Motomorphosis exhibit, which opens tomorrow at NYC's Armory Week art fair, they've stretched two real cars into unlikely forms.
Motomorphosis presents sculptural transformations of two Lexus vehicles, altered into impossible shapes through a recurring MSCHF motif: the application of the vernacular of digital-native operations to physical objects.
The resulting works, Twisted Car and Circle Car, are installed alongside their unaltered versions - the RX 450h+ Plug-in Hybrid and the All-Electric RZ 450e, respectively. Twisted and stretched, the cars become abstracted, blurring the lines between consumer luxury and sculptural form.
MSCHF takes the world around itself as raw material for sampling, recombination, transformation and collage. We live in a world of objects, and exist against this ubiquitous background noise of utilitarianism; it is only reinvention, transformation, that abruptly defamiliarizes these things in our lives and suddenly calls our attention afresh to the full suite of details and decisions that make up our experience of a car.
The works are dynamic, implying their motions. In animation smear frames are intermediary images in which objects and characters distort beyond their realistic shapes and boundaries so that, when played back, motion becomes fluid. The sculptures capture an idea of motion that exists in our mind's eye - true to the car's nature rather than the constraints of reality.
The vehicles, if you can call them that, will be on display at the Chelsea Industrial event space from Sept. 24th to 26th.