Directed by Milo Christie and Sam Dybeck.
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Directed by Milo Christie and Sam Dybeck.
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Yan Wen Chang, Andrew Harding
Yan Wen Chang (b. 1993) is a painter exploring the American Dream. She holds a MFA from the School of Fine Art and Music at the University of Guelph in Canada and a BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design University. She has exhibited at Susan Hobbs Gallery (Toronto), X in Residency (Toronto), and General Hardware (Toronto). Her 33ft public billboard entitled “same problem my father had and what he dreamed” was on display at Hamilton Artists’ Inc. from 2022 to 2023. Chang’s forthcoming solo exhibitions include A.D. NYC (New York) and Hawkins Headquarters (Atlanta) in 2024. Chang currently works and lives in Guelph, Canada.
Andrew Harding (b. 1995, Toronto) is an artist who works across sculpture and installation and explores themes of hybridity through found imagery and fabricated forms. Harding completed his MFA at York University (2022), and has shown works in solo and group exhibitions across Toronto and Ontario with upcoming exhibitions in Chicago (2024) and Bowmanville (2025). Harding’s projects have been supported by the Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council, Métis Nation of Ontario and SSHRC funding bodies.
Press Release
‘Here is what having your own ride means where I am from. Your house could be falling apart, you could be wondering what you are going to eat next week, you might owe seventy-three of your relatives a twenty spot here and a five spot there, but the first hint of money and there you are, you’ve got a light in your eyes, you find yourself at a dealership, you are walking into the Great American Dream.’
A car can die much like a person can when its constituent parts fail domino-like, and we insure their longevity the same way with bets and wagers, milked of their haecceitic horror. This version of a car is shedding its slick dark excess, shredded rubber, heat, soot, oil, pure shit; but this is all happening in the behind, the underneath, the hidden-by-design. To talk about the headlights of a car acting like watchful eyes feels both overused and bleak, the only way we dance together is as owner and pet; craftsmen and tool; body and outfit; a sense of taming. You tame the chaotic combustion and you go wherever you want to go. The subtle qualitative control was not shed when horses were replaced, but falters to its existence as a commodity, a normalized status symbol whereby the pure shit of living is a short thought thrown out the window with a frosty cup. You’ll never look cooler than you do with your right arm leant out of the passenger window at 80 in true James Dean.
But the dealership, right? A weird place, with distinct cultural gravitas. That’s what we’re supposed to be talking about. And the Salesman - ‘there was something small and weak hiding behind his mustache and his brown slacks and his slightly wrinkled tan shirt with its sleeves rolled up his hairy arms, and I somehow knew that he had never been in a fight in his life or had not won a fight or had not had his face hit so hard that he lost all shame about running, and when I saw this he stopped being real to me.’ Dealerships do operate with heavy regulation support, rent-seeking, almost. You can’t start a new one, and the car manufacturers can’t bypass independent dealers and go directly to the consumer. States earn about 20 percent of all state sales taxes from auto dealers. In ‘Lafontaine, Francine, and Fiona Scott Morton. 2010. "Markets: State Franchise Laws, Dealer Terminations, and the Auto Crisis." Journal of Economic Perspectives’, the authors surmise that ‘as a result of these laws, distribution costs and retail prices are higher than they otherwise would be; and this is particularly true for Detroit's Big Three car manufacturers -- which is likely a factor contributing to their losses in market share vis-á-vis other manufacturers.’ Think of the aestheticization of urban decay after Detroit went bust, and how the last trickles of the ways cars felt and were to the American Dream in the 20th century evaporated. The wager was lost, and in its failure the excess was repurposed. You’ll never look cooler than you do when you lose, when you lose and then just leave.
HolyWhiteMountain, Sterling. “False Star.” The New Yorker, 20 Mar. 2023, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/20/false-star.
Lafontaine, Francine, and Fiona Scott Morton. “Markets: State franchise laws, dealer terminations, and the Auto Crisis.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 24, no. 3, 1 Aug. 2010, pp. 233–250, https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.24.3.233
Yan Wen Chang and Andrew Harding would like to acknowledge funding from the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Ontario for their support.
Andrew Harding’s work was produced with the support of the City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council.
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