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.
