Ana Benaroya: The Passenger

8 Apr-10 May 2021

Overview

Curated by Morgan Aguiar-Lucander. Throughout the history of images, women and cars have had a fraught relationship. Often flung together in the pursuit of profits, women’s bodies have been used to market cars to men since advertisers managed to equate the purchase of the car, with the lifestyle the woman draped atop it represented. The automobile is a cultural manifestation of the American dream: the freedom to roam beyond the horizon and to remake oneself in the image of one’s own ambition. Yet it is precisely through the leveraging of women’s sensuality, that the car has been transformed into an American symbol of success, freedom and virility. A parallel thread of association exists through art history, running from the Italian Futurists, through to Richard Prince’s appropriated Marlboro Cowboy, and perhaps finding its apex in Jeff Koon’s Hoover vitrines: at once sterile objects and yet intensely eroticized.