Overview

The Perfect Ride (1997-2002) is a major new three-part installation by Jennifer Pastor, who first received nationwide recognition in 1996 when her installation The Four Seasons (1992-96) was featured in solo and group exhibitions at major museums across the country and in Europe, including the Whitney Museum of American Art's 1997 Biennial Exhibition. The Perfect Ride is Pastor's first major installation since The Four Seasons. Continuing in a lineage that can be traced back to artists including Claes Oldenburg and Jeff Koons, Pastor's work reflects a sensibility somewhere between Pop art and kitsch. While her works often have the look of prefabricated objects, they are in fact the products of meticulous research and painstaking craftsmanship, as she recreates her subjects by hand over the course of years of intense dedication and labour. Imbued with slight formal twists and subtle tweaks, each work skews boundaries between reality and fantasy, rendering something formerly familiar into an unsettling new object. The Perfect Ride comprises two sculptures and a projected line-drawn animation. The first part of the project is a slightly outsized, pseudo-scientific cast-polyurethane rendition of a human ear, based on the artist's memory of a model in a medical museum. The second part is a large steel, aluminium, and cast-fibreglass sculpture whose contours were inspired by the Hoover Dam. The third section is a projected animation of an idealized representation of a cowboy riding a bucking bull. Rather than proposing a clear narrative, the juxtaposition of the three discrete elements alludes indirectly to man's triumphs over nature, whether they be scientific or athletic, cerebral or physical, as well as to the attendant notions of awe and perfection that such feats inspire.

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Curator of the exhibition, Debra Singer is executive director and chief curator of The Kitchen in New York, and a founding editor of Cabinet magazine Jan Tumlir is an independent curator and writer for Art Forum, Artweek, and Art Issues, as well as LA Weekly and Frieze, among others.

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