Car Crash

85 x 69.75 inches, colored pencil and graphite on paper

In a car crash chain, the physics (example of Newton’s Laws of Motion) involves rapid changes in momentum as kinetic energy from one car is transferred at impact to the next car, which then transfers energy to the following car, and so on. This creates a coiling effect that expands and contracts with each successive crash. I thought of this as analogous to the societal transfer of wealth from poor to rich. This process is evident in products and assets—vehicles—whose practical function is incrementally usurped by their form as luxury objects. As this process unfolds over time, it also seemed to me analogous to how a wormhole suggests passage through space-time.

This drawing “begins” at the top left with one of the least expensive cars in the U.S., a Honda Civic, which crashes into a more expensive car, and so on. The value of each successive car rises incrementally, eventually peaking with the most expensive luxury vehicle available for purchase, a Lotus. After this phase, cars from films and television shows crash into each other, followed by cartoon cars and fictional ones. In the center, the car as a purely visual form becomes an abstraction and is absorbed into a wormhole-like space, with colors that loop back to the starting point, perpetuating an endless car crash chain. The spiraling geometric bands that structure the drawing increase and decrease in scale proportionately as the drawing moves centripetally, while its ideas expand centrifugally. Each car changes direction to imply both transfer of energy and alternating point of view—as if we were in the crashing car, and simultaneously in the one being crashed into.