Lowrider Builder and Child

2012 - Photography (Photography)

50 x 63 inches

Liz Cohen


The photographic work Lowrider Builder and Child is a companion piece to the video Hydroforce , which features Cohen in the late stage of her pregnancy posing atop a German car that she transformed into a lowrider in a period of ten years. While in Hydroforce we see the artist pregnant, Lowrider Builder and Child features the artist’s newborn by her side. In the image, the positioning of Cohen’s body, together with the tranquil, idyllic nature of the site in which she reclines to breastfeed her baby — with the gentle light gleaming as it bounces off the hood of her car — is a nod to classical reclining nude paintings, which invariably portray female subjects. Beyond the image’s beautiful composition, the work interrogates different layers of meaning, engaging with the politics of the body, motherhood, the female identity, subcultural aesthetics and the ways in which they are all represented.


Liz Cohen is a photographer and performance artist best known for her project Bodywork , in which she transformed a German car into a lowrider while simultaneously transforming her own body, with the help of a fitness instructor, to become a bikini model at lowrider shows. Critical of a consumer based society and its use of the female body in advertisements and music videos, Bodywork was an avenue for Cohen to explore her own femininity and create dialogue around issues relating to immigration, nonconformity, and resistance. Some of her earlier works, consisting of black-and-white photographs and a series of performances, focused on similar issues, which she explored through documenting sex workers from the Panama Canal, as well as producing various portraits of an ostracised poet.


Colors:



Flutter
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Zarouhie Abdalian

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Doug Aitken

2009

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Larry Bell

2007

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Black Imitates White
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Hank Willis Thomas

2012

Thomas’ lenticular text-based works require viewers to shift positions as they view them in order to fully absorb their content...

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Hydroforce
© » KADIST

Liz Cohen

2011

From among a cloud of fake smoke we see a heavily pregnant Cohen wearing a bikini and golden stilettos with lace-up straps wrapped around her legs, grasping onto the frame of a modified car as its loud hydraulic system clumsily moves it up and down...

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Masterpieces from the Barbier-Mueller African and Oceanic Art collection to be sold at Christie's in Paris
© » THEARTNEWSPER

Masterpieces from the Barbier-Mueller African and Oceanic Art collection to be sold at Christie's in Paris Art market Museums & heritage Exhibitions Books Podcasts Columns Technology Adventures with Van Gogh Search Search African art news Masterpieces from the Barbier-Mueller African and Oceanic Art collection to be sold at Christie's in Paris The auction next month will include 100 pieces acquired by Josef Müller and his family Vincent Noce 6 February 2024 Share Twin Baulé mask (Nda), Côte d'ivoire Image: Christie's Ltd One hundred pieces from the prestigious Barbier-Mueller African and Oceanic Art Collection will be auctioned at Christie’s in Paris on 6 March...

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Hydroforce
© » KADIST

Liz Cohen

2011

From among a cloud of fake smoke we see a heavily pregnant Cohen wearing a bikini and golden stilettos with lace-up straps wrapped around her legs, grasping onto the frame of a modified car as its loud hydraulic system clumsily moves it up and down...

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Adriana Bustos

2018

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Study from May Day March, Los Angeles 2010 (Immigration Reform Now) and We Are Immigrants Not Terrorists
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Andrea Bowers

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The small drawings that comprise Study from May Day March, Los Angeles 2010 (Immigration Reform Now) and We Are Immigrants Not Terrorists are based on photographs taken at a political rally in downtown Los Angeles in which thousands of individuals demonstrated for immigrants’ rights...

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2010

In Stong Sory Vegetables , Laure Prouvost explains that she woke up one morning and that some vegetables had fallen from the sky on her bed, making a hole in her ceiling...

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Lynn Hershman Leeson

2016

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