MSCHF creates MOTOMORPHOSIS for Lexus
A new exhibition debuts two surreal electrified sculptures during New York's Armory Week, on view Sept. 24–26 at Chelsea Industrial.
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MSCHF twisted one Lexus electrified vehicle and stretched another into new sculptural forms.
MOTOMORPHOSIS goes on view this September in New York during Armory Week. Lexus commissioned Brooklyn-based conceptual art collective MSCHF to create two new works for the exhibition. The works take two production Lexus electrified vehicles and reimagines each as its own sculptural double.
Such formal distortions are a recurring motif in MSCHF’s work, which often translates the vernacular of digital transformations into the physical world, producing a feeling of impossibility. In MOTOMORPHOSIS, these transformations recall the plasticity of geometry found in 3D animation, where shapes need not be static or fixed, but squash and stretch through smear frames according to action.
Credits
View on- Agency Team One/Los Angeles
- Production Company Applied MSCHF
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Credits
View on- Agency Team One/Los Angeles
- Production Company Applied MSCHF
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Credits
powered by- Agency Team One/Los Angeles
- Production Company Applied MSCHF
MOTOMORPHOSIS displays two production cars alongside their surreal sculptural counterparts. A Lexus RZ450e appears once as an electric vehicle, and again as sculpture in Circle Car, looped nose-to-tail, driving infinitely round. Similarly, the Lexus RX450h+ appears twice, first in familiar form and then in Twisted Car, in dramatic longitudinal torsion, its lines liquified and surface features pulled along tangent to the twisting spiral of its body.
MSCHF describes these works as ‘Form Cars,’ as opposed to ‘Concept Cars,’ but this also ends up nicely inverted: where a car is concretely engineered to move, the works in MOTOMORPHOSIS are sculpted to produce the idea of movement.
When juxtaposed with their originals, Lexus’ electrified vehicles, Twisted Car and Circle Car speak to the fluid nature of our mind’s representation of objects, never separated from our understanding of the car’s dynamic capacity for movement.
“Most conversations about electrification focus on how a vehicle is powered. MOTOMORPHOSIS asks a different question: what can electricity power in our imagination?” said Lisa McQueen, senior manager, Lexus marketing. “Working with MSCHF allowed us to take the automobile beyond its familiar form and explore movement, transformation and possibility in an entirely new way.”
MOTOMORPHOSIS opens to the public for a three-day run at Chelsea Industrial in New York.
