Liz Roberts: Post Blonde

FotoFocus and Weston Art Gallery present Liz Roberts: Post Blonde at CampSITE Sculpture Park. This new site-specific commission presents an uninhabited drive-in tableau in which one automobile is left and others are repeatedly disembodied to form a large movie screen made from salvaged windshields. Nostalgic and thirsty for typical road movie tropes, the installation references the resurgence of drive-ins and the pining for collective voyeurism of movie screenings.

The projections of a winding Cincinnati road within the vehicle’s windows move slowly, almost at the pace of walking. The video on the screen alludes to the notion of an afterlife, with moving images lingering in a used car lot on Beechmont Avenue and the U-Pull-&-Pay yard. Interspersed are the final shots from American road movies, using the ends of central texts from the genre to signal a decline of empire.

The individual car is a proxy for isolation. This interplay between the one and the many is represented by images of cars in groupings captured by Roberts, coupled with excerpts from Almost Famous (2000), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Easy Rider (1969), Mad Max Fury Road (2015), My Own Private Idaho (1991), Paris, Texas (1984), Thelma and Louise (1991), True Romance (1993), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), Vanishing Point (1971), and Wild at Heart (1990). The dialogue of images from each film speculate that we are in the last gasps, while also on the precipice, of something transformative. But what comes after—what is ‘post’ transformation? What is on the other side of the collapse of capitalism, cataclysmic climate change, institutionally perpetuated systems of exploitation, and how can this transformation be recorded?