Bel Ami's 'The Cars of Los Angeles' Explores Automobility's Dark Legacy

The exhibition 'The Cars of Los Angeles' at Bel Ami in Los Angeles examines the intertwined histories of the automobile and cinema, and their collective impact on culture and mortality. Curated around themes of speed, class mobility, and petro-capitalism, the show features works by Nicole Antonia Spagnola and Jason Hirata, among others. Spagnola's video 'Ragged Dick' reimagines a silent film where a child shoe shiner dies after being run over by a horse-drawn carriage, symbolizing the economic and mortal costs of progress. The exhibition traces the evolution from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles, citing historical facts such as the 20,000 dead horses in New York by 1910 and the 'Horsey Horseless' hybrid vehicle. It also references literary works by Monika Rinck, Ilya Ehrenburg, and Viktor Shklovsky to contextualize the cultural and philosophical dimensions of automobility. The show connects early cinema's 'kingdom of shadows' as described by Maxim Gorky in 1896 to the contemporary experience of driving in Los Angeles, where highways and Hollywood emerged together. Hirata's readymade sculpture, which transforms a catalytic converter into a god-like object, critiques the environmental and spiritual consequences of fossil fuel dependence. The exhibition ultimately presents a haunting vision of decay and destruction, suggesting that the end of the road is prefigured in the very origins of cinema and the automobile.