Liz Cohen debuts the Trambantamino at Salon 94 NYC

The longtime Phoenix artist, now based at Cranbrook outside of Detroit, unveiled her years-in-the-making installation at a New York gallery.

Liz Cohen's "Trabantimino" to be unveiled in New York Oct. 7

The Phoenix native, now teaching outside of Detroit, has been working on the project for eight years.

The centerpiece is an East German car, a Trabant, which she has rebuilt to expand, transformer-like, into a Chevy El Camino, the ‘70s-era car-pickup.

The work also includes extensive photography showing Cohen as a bikini-clad car model brandishing various power tools.

The work in progress was shown occasionally in town, where she lived until 2008.

A recent New York Times blog item on Cohen is here. A 2006 New Times cover feature on her is here.

Full announcement from New York’s Salon 94 Bowery gallery is below.

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Liz Cohen

Trabantimino

7 October – 11 November 2010

Salon 94 Bowery

243 Bowery

Opening Reception

Thursday, 7 October, 6-8

For Immediate Release

Salon 94 Bowery is pleased to open our renovated doors with an exhibition of Detroit-based artist Liz Cohen. Trabantimino takes center stage after eight years of body work and an unlikely journey from the former East Germany to Oakland, Scottsdale, and Detroit. Trabantimino is a hybridized car and kinetic sculpture that combines a former East German Trabant with a Chevrolet El Camino.

The Trabantimino is an amalgam of two different now-defunct Cold War era types: the East German “people’s car-” humble, anonymous, and functional, and the all-American, large-bodied, low-rider cowboy car. The sculpture contains roughly equal parts of both cars; its main frame a modest Trabant beige, yet then extends out into the full length of the El Camino- showing off its newly chromed American parts.

Cohen purchased the Trabant in 2002 in Berlin, and in the intervening years has become a master mechanic, doing most of the physical work herself. With the help of her mechanic mentors, including Dave Ornellas of World Wide Customs in Oakland; Don Barselloti of Elwood Bodyworks in Scottsdale; and Harvey Ledesma, Don Roberts, and Tom Mello at Kustom Creations in Detroit, Cohen learned the tools of the trade. In the process she hybridized herself, taking on the seemingly disparate roles of journeyman mechanic and bikini-clad car show model, mimicking the pinups found on body shop walls.

Originally a photographer, Cohen began the Trabantimino as a way to break down the barriers between her models and herself, literally becoming what she documented. Alongside the car, the gallery will be showing a series of photographs called the 5 P’s (Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance) from 2005. Cohen documented every tool amassed by her original mentor, Bill Cherry, throughout his thirty-plus years as a mechanic. The tools are photographed starkly, in black and white on a cement ground, and are reminiscent of Walker Evans’ 1955 project “The Beauty of the Common Tool.” In addition, we will include the ephemera and various publications featuring the Trabantimino, from inception to display.

Liz Cohen lives and works in Detroit. She has exhibited nationally and internationally including exhibitions at the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, Galerie Laurent Godin, Fargfabriken, David Klein Gallery (Detroit), The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco). She has received awards and fellowships from the Creative Capital Foundation and Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue, the MacDowell Colony, and Akademie Schoss Solitude. She is the Artist-in-Residence/Head of Photography at the Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Salon 94 would like to extend our thanks to the garages and mechanics who have helped Liz along the way, and to Creative Capital who awarded Liz the seed money to realize this project. The Trabantimino would not have been possible without the generous support of the following people and organizations: Akademie Schloss Solitude . Fine Arts Unternehman . Creative Capital Foundation . Fargfabriken . Don Barselloti/ Elwood Bodyworks . Harvey Ledesma/ Kustom Creations . Al Sharp/ Experi-Metal Inc . Scott Myles/ JE Myles Inc

Additional thanks: Scott Barsellotti, Michael Brammer, Beatriz Cohen, Emily Cohen, Roseann Cohen, Chico, Brian Foltyn, Natasha Garcia-Lomas, Kit Golsarry, Toni Heineman, Emily Hurley, Jordan Long, Nick Olson, Melissa McGorty, Dan Miller, Felicia Molnar, Imre Molnar, Adrienne Peters, Tom Peters, Erin Sweeny, Youngster and Alan Ziegler

Salon 94 Bowery is located at 243 Bowery in New York, NY. The gallery is open on Wednesdays through Sundays from 11AM-6PM. For further information please call (212)529-7400 or email info@salon94.com.

The NYT blogs about quondam Phoenix artist Liz Cohen

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:

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.