A Car Ride (Sculpture)

2025. Aluminum T-slot Extrusion Bars, Steel Corner Brackets, Hex Socket Bolts, Washers, T-nuts, Manually Sanded Matte Acrylic Plates, Inkjet Paper, Pigment-based Ink, Transfer Gel

24 x 55cm x 90cm

“A Car Ride”, a sculptural work, extends from the eponymous photographic series "A Car Ride" 2025, an experimental exploration of the complex relationship between passenger, vehicle, and external environment. The original series posed a deceptively simple yet conceptually rich question: What happens when we stabilize the camera, but let the world move around it?

Using a suction-mounted setup, the camera remained fixed while surroundings blurred into motion. The artist, situated within the vehicle, shifted both voluntarily and involuntarily, creating haunting images where a static car interior contrasted with ghostlike traces of movement and distorted human forms against a speeding, blurred exterior. These photographs captured a suspended space between departure and arrival—a meditation on liminality, transition, and the fluidity of identity in transit.

The sculptural extension translates these temporal, photographic moments into tangible, dimensional objects through a precise yet vulnerable process. Each acrylic plate is first sanded to a matte finish, then transfer gel is applied to both the inkjet-printed image and the plate surface. The two are pressed together and left to dry—a moment suspended, still, waiting.

Once dried, the plate is carefully soaked in water, where time becomes precarious: too long and the gel begins to dissolve; too short and the paper cannot release. With precision and vulnerability, the softened paper fibers are rubbed away using only fingertips, revealing what remains—ink imperfectly bonded to acrylic, fractured by process and pressure. This degraded image is then dried and laminated beneath a second acrylic plate, creating a sealed relic of memory and error. Once we hold a memory, our errors in recalling it become sealed within—fixed until we attempt to retrieve and reshape it.

Mounted in industrial aluminum frameworks and secured with knurled hex socket bolts, the plates slide like archival specimens—structurally inspired by preserved biological samples and vinyl record storage. Each image functions as a standalone artwork, yet collectively they move as a sequence, ordered from least to most damaged. This transition becomes its own narrative: from clarity to corrosion, from intact recollection to fragile ruin. It forms a visual gradient of how memory erodes, is altered, and held together by time and force.

The work operates as both archive and active process—each piece holds degraded traces of a moment that can never be fully recovered. The sequence documents not just a journey, but the inevitable corruption that occurs when we attempt to preserve experience. What remains is neither the original photograph nor pure memory, but something else entirely: a record of the space between remembering and forgetting.