TITLE
Carbon Copy  

ARTIST
Caitlind r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett

LOCATION
Edmonton Brewery District . 10405 – 120 Street, Edmonton, Alberta

Winner of Urban Fragments Award of Excellence & People’s Choice Award  

DESCRIPTION

Carbon Copy is a new public sculpture using a 1988 Plymouth Caravelle to create a pithy monument to car culture in North America. Designed for the site-specific context of Edmonton’s newly re-opened Brewery District, Carbon Copy transforms an unremarkable suburban car into an illuminated obelisk, a monument to North America’s auto-centric culture, and a glitch in our regular understanding of everyday life. To create this public artwork, the artists worked with fabricators to transform an existing vehicle (bought off kijiji) by cutting and re-shaping the car into a new form simulating digital glitch aesthetics. Derived from a “rolling shudder smear,Carbon Copy is based on scanner manipulations created by sliding an image across the scanner bed while it’s being copied. The sculpture re-interprets this digital information back into physical form using the raw materiality of a found automobile.

An intervention in plain sight, the artwork is installed on the corner of a parking lot and above a parkade in the Edmonton Brewery District. At night, the artwork’s signal lights and tail light glow, and a scanner bar strobes the surrounding parking lot every 20 seconds. Carbon Copy creates a narrative of divergent aesthetics: D and 3D, real and surreal, digital and physical, comedic and imposing, familiar and new. Ultimately, the artists hope the work will become a wayfinding device for Edmontonians – whether they’re travelling by foot, by bus, or by car, the sculpture will become a familiar fixture in the landscape.

For more details follow www.carboncopycar.ca