Chris Car

Member Since September 30, 2008


Chris Car was born in Austria, Europe but is currently living in Montreal, Canada. His inspirations for his sculptures come from two distinct sources: mass-produced consumer products and software development.

He is selecting mass-produced consumer items, assembling them into patterns and combining these patterns to give form to a sculpture. This repetitive process refers to software programming: combining algorithms, functions and software patterns into software programs. When working on sculptures, he calls his work process “visual programming”.

The relationship between software programs and consumer products is not far fetched: most of the items used are so-called Blobjects: colorful, plastic-based, emotionally engaging consumer products designed on a computer by using specialized design software. The iPod is the most prominent example of a popular Blobject (among other products at Ikea, H&M, etc.). These products are sold globally and define a global culture.
Although his sculptures are made from these products, they rather represent counter-products with non-linear and almost random shapes, fragile and visually overloaded with details.

Another aspect of his sculptural work is the visualization of the changes in society: from the industrial society to the post-industrial information society. From linear assembly lines at Ford - to “multi-tasking” office jobs at Google. Currently we find ourselves in a so-called transformation society which makes life seem to be very complex and demanding, due to the rapid changes happening within just a few years. Chris Car tries to express this feeling of the current era through “visual complexity” in his work.

Summary: He tries to create compressed cultural objects.