Free Bird: The Never Ending Joy Ride
1998-2016

The car is a road and not an object. It is a vector, connector, and route within systems of relations that make meaning, identity, and political economy. It is an attachment: a life-making prosthetic.

Artist Guy Overfelt understands its rich depth well. His work is about the plenum of the surface: it plays off the car’s profundity as it roves around in plain sight. The car is the wellspring of American life, a motivator of its urbanism, shaper and de-shaper of its economy, bearer of citizen identity by way of the driver’s license, inflamer of petrol-driven combat, and an equal-opportunity phallus. From within this matrix, Overfelt makes conceptual car art—art that unfolds around the car as a mediator of the world. He uses the car self-reflexively, to point back at itself and at the human-as-machine, catalyzing a litany of questions on bio-life, ecology, oil, war, and, that once sacred rubric, manhood.

Overfelt’s Free Bird: The Never Ending Joy Ride, 1998-2016 functions something like a mile marker within a eighteen-year art project that, akin to the fluctuating nature of the car itself, is more journey than shiny object. If the car is a thoroughfare, and Overfelt’s Free Bird is a trek across the landscape of life, then Overfelt himself is an orchestrator of the machine as existential condenser. Instead of art as an object, Overfelt’s Free Bird is all about layer fitting atop layer, and system imbricating with system.

- Charissa N. Terranova

This exhibition is presented by Ever Gold Projects.