Colorado, 2016

(collaboration with Laura Hughes at Locust Projects, Miami)

Rubber, mylar, resin, Miami detritus, car debris, foam, cat hair

From www.locustprojects.org, written by Elizabeth Shannon.

Locust Projects is pleased to present Colorado, a new project by this year’s LAB MFA artists, Beki Basch and Laura Hughes, who have been selected to develop and produce their project Colorado in LP 03. This is the second year that Locust Projects has held a national open call for the LAB MFA program and we are thrilled to have received proposals from students attending a broad range of schools across the United States.

Basch and Hughes have produced an exhibition consisting of imagery relating to cars and the American landscape. Friends of ten years standing, who studied together at MICA and previously shared a studio space, Colorado is the first project on which the two artists have collaborated. Titled for the approximate geographical halfway point between Basch’s home in Baltimore, Maryland on the east coast, and Hughes in Eugene, Oregon on the west coast, Colorado is a sculptural interpretation of the experience of taking a cross-country roadtrip.

Drawing on the imagery of vinyl seats, bumper stickers, motor racing, and the detritus of long car journeys – such as the coins and candy wrappers which are often excavated from between the car seats on subsequent rides – the installation is intended to elicit familiar personal and cultural memories of taking a long roadtrip. The car’s interior becomes a world within a wider world, and time seems to pass in a new and different way. Small objects arranged around the space offer a sense of the intimacy of the car’s interior. The wider installation acts as a landscape, with large-scale sculptural pieces dominating the space like mountains. Found objects – many of which have been collected from Miami’s roadsides – can be seen embedded in some of the resin objects, including one of two sculptures that take the form of an winner’s podium. These two podiums have been conceived as commemorative portraits of Michèle Mouton, the woman who won the Pike’s Peak Hill Climb in 1985, an annual race that is unofficially known as “The Race to the Clouds”.