FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

There comes a point in art and life when you have to take a risk and put it all on the line for what you believe in, so my wife and I took our life savings combined with the contributions of a few brave friends, bought a Hummer H2 and destroyed it the same day, for the sake of art.

{CTS} creative thriftshop is honored and overjoyed to announce that Jeremy Dean‘s converted Hummer, the first true custom hybrid car will be on view at the Pulse Contemporary art fair March 4th- March 7th, 2010 at the fairs’ new location 330 West Street in New York City.

In the midst of the worst economic recession since the Great Depression, acclaimed filmmaker and artist Jeremy Dean has captured the turmoil of the times with a cutting edge new piece of interactive large-scale sculpture.

Dean has taken a gas guzzling 8 mile-per-gallon HUMMER H2, a symbol of extravagance, and converted it into a working horse drawn cart. Dean has pimped it out with silver chrome, working LED lights and a booming audio and video system. He calls this piece the “CEO Stagecoach.”

The concept for the “Futurama” series combines the traditional focus on function and horsepower in early modes of transport with the car industries’ advancements since. Part car - part carriage, this line of eight proposed converted vehicles juxtaposes the history of the automobile, developments of the car industry, current moment of automotive market crisis and the individual’s ability to be driven to create in order to meet means. Dean’s vehicles reference horse drawn carriages which are no longer primary transport for aristocratic elite, the once glorious now gratuitous SUV culture of recent past, and the jalopies that were a bi-product of the Depression.

Here the artist’s work weaves a fanciful story of the little known Hoover Carts of the Great Depression. As the economy worsened to a point that people could no longer afford gasoline for their newly financed Model Ts, to cope, the owners removed the engines and attached horses to their cars. These contraptions became known as “Hoover Carts” named after President Hover and in Canada they became known as “Bennent Buggies,” named after their Prime Minister.

The title of the series “Back to Futurama,” is a play on the GM Futurama display at the 1939 World Fair where GM made grandiose predictions about the future and how the automobile would save the world. “I have always been interested in exploring contemporary issues by deconstructing and re-contextualizing iconic symbols to gain perspective and understanding about the world in which we live. This has been even more important to me in the current state of economic, environmental, and political instability. This project uses an American symbols of power and status to questions our future by looking at a past response to excess and subsequent collapse.”

Taking the logic of the past, Jeremy Dean’s body of work makes a satirical prediction of the future “If we don’t rethink our reliance on a hyper-inflated, consumption-based oil economy, we may be left with no other options than to hook our cars up to a horse. This is an exploration of historical amnesia, the culture of excess, financial collapse, sustainability and the future, through leather steel and chrome.”


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