Cohen grew up in Phoenix and until recently worked on her longterm Bodywork project in town. Two years ago, she left to teach photography at Cranbrook.

The centerpiece of the endeavor is a car—an East German Trabant that, improbably, morphs itself into a Chevy El Camino, those car-cum-pickups popular back in the 1970s. The contraption is also outfitted with low rider-style hydraulics. The resulting melange represents the cross-cultural meshings that mark our society—east and west, north and south, suburban and urban—as well as Cohen herself, whose father was a Jew from the Middle East and whose mother is Colombian.

Here’s the pic by the writer, Tamara Warren, illustrating a Times post about Cohen’s work today in the paper’s Wheels blog:


liz_cohen_in_NYT


From the post:

In 2002 [Cohen] began building a lowrider out of a 1987 Trabant and a 1973 Chevrolet El Camino. Since then the Trabantimino, as she calls it, has been an ongoing work of art, part sculptural installation and part functional custom-build — an eight-year immersion into the heart of American car culture in which Ms. Cohen’s own self-transformation has played a significant role.

“I wanted to design a project in which I could participate in the culture,” she said.

The project pairs the massive mechanical and fabrication project that is the car with a large photography component that chronicles both the car’s construction and Photoshopped photos of Cohen herself. She’s near completion of the years-long project in anticipation of a show in New York’s Salon 94 gallery, currently scheduled for this fall.

Full post with video here.

A New Times cover story on Cohen from a few years ago here.