Clarissa Tossin, “How Does it Travel?” at Samuel Freeman

For the past five years, Brazilian-born, Los Angeles-based artist Clarissa Tossin has traveled between her adopted and native country exploring the dichotomies of modernist paradigms. In her first solo exhibition at Samuel Freeman Gallery, this dialogue begins with an older model beige VW Brasilia parked outside the gallery. The timeworn hatchback, seemingly a Duchampian found object, is actually a construction of the artist. Tossin purchased the car in Brazil, “assisted” the readymade into a facsimile of a worker’s utility vehicle, drove through upper class neighborhoods before transporting the car to the states. The Brasilia, originally produced for Brazil’s rising middle class, ceased production in 1983 and soon thereafter became the workhorse of the working class. Inside the gallery, a ghostlike latex skin of the Brasilia, cast from its exterior, spreads out like a bearskin rug on the floor of the gallery, suggesting the passing of the utopian dreams it once embodied.

Further inside, two wooden benches painted in bright Kelly green are placed strategically in the multi-room gallery, the baseboards of which also received a coating of the cheerful color. This hue echoes the trim seen on the homes in the photographs hung singly or paired in the main room. The similarity between each is immediately apparent: a modest home holds center stage and is partially obscured by the photographer’s hand holding a cut-out photograph of what appears to be the same, or similar, facade, evoking the unsettling ambiguity wrought by Magritte’s The Human Condition (1933). The homes, though nearly identical, reside thousands of miles apart in Belterra, Brazil and Alberta, Michigan—both the vision of early 20th century icon of modernist progress, Henry Ford. The two communities were built in the mid-1930s to house Ford Motor Company factory workers in the production of rubber and lumber, respectively. However, both of Ford’s planned communities soon faced extinction; the fickle transience of progress is highlighted by the towns’ biographies. Also in Tossin’s sights, architect Oscar Neimeyer’s geometric design for Brazil’s capital city. A series of Michael Light-style aerial photographs and related prints made using Brasilia’s rich soil in place of ink juxtapose Niemeyer’s modernist blueprint with the actual needs of the population. The emphatically square grid plan, aesthetically bold, is undermined by pathways created by workers traversing unpaved field between the asphalt highways. As Tossin mines the imported aesthetics, for her conceptual critique, she asks us to reconsider “How does it travel?”