For a few nights during New York’s Armory Week, Lexus and Brooklyn art collective MSCHF took over a former industrial space in the Meatpacking District and did something rather unexpected with the automobile.
MOTOMORPHOSIS takes two Lexus electrified vehicles and asks what happens when a car stops behaving like a car.
The answer comes in two wonderfully strange forms. Circle Car transforms a Lexus RZ 450e into a continuous loop, its nose meeting its tail in an impossible suggestion of perpetual motion. Twisted Car takes the Lexus RX 450h+ and stretches its body into a dramatic longitudinal spiral, as though the car has been caught mid-movement and pulled through space.
MSCHF calls them “Form Cars,” rather than concept cars. It is a good distinction. These aren’t proposals for future vehicles so much as physical provocations — cars treated as malleable objects rather than fixed pieces of engineering. The effect recalls the strange elasticity of digital animation, where a form can stretch, compress and distort without having to obey the rules of the physical world.
Seeing the sculptures alongside the actual Lexus vehicles makes the joke even better. One is engineered to move; the other is engineered to look as though it is moving. Electrification becomes less about what powers the car and more about what the car might become.
The exhibition itself felt appropriately removed from the usual automotive launch. The Meatpacking District space had the rawness to let the sculptures take over, while the opening crowd was decidedly New York — exceptionally cool, fashion-heavy and curious, with a DJ keeping the room moving around two objects that were themselves built around the idea of movement.
There was a party, certainly. But there was also something genuinely playful happening underneath it.
Lexus has spent years talking about the future of the automobile. MOTOMORPHOSIS takes a more interesting route: imagine the car first, and worry about the rules later.
On the Saint Lawrence River.
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