Disassembly Line

November 20th - December 4th, 2021

A car show featuring works by
Claudia Parducci, Mannix Vega, Jing Feng, Ivan Rios Fetchko, Yassi Mazandi, Daniel Healey, Max Hertz

PRESS RELEASE

Molly Barnes and Spy Projects are pleased to present Disassembly Line, an exhibition of seven artists’ interventions on a 1998 Oldsmobile Eighty-Eight. The exhibition will be on view November 20th-December 4th, 2021, at Molly’s Garage.

The origins of American mass production can be located in the Disassembly Line, a concept credited to organizational techniques of 19th century slaughterhouses in the midwest. Conveyor belts transported product through a production line of butchering, cutting and packaging in preparation for market. Ford Motor Company inverted the model, and the American assembly line was born. Ford reduced the entire production time for the Model-T to ninety three minutes, “Faster than the paint on the car could dry.”

The artists in Disassembly Line use components of a stripped automobile to intervene as they see fit, although the reassembled product is neither predetermined nor subject to a 93 minute deadline. It is instead the object, subject, and byproduct of seven creative interventions combined in one car.

The labor is individuated, as it was in the original assembly, but the component parts do not create a functional whole. This car has been gutted from the inside-out- forgoing it’s primary utility as a method of transportation. It now exists as a vehicle of the uncanny, a space to hold friction between absent, transformed, and additive components. In this iteration the car is more than the American talisman of individual liberty; it serves as a physical reminder of the abundance derived from collaborative efforts, and the temporal consequences of prosperity.