Pack up the Pontiac but don’t bother filling the tank: where Chris LaBrooy’s taking us, we don’t need roads! UK-based LaBrooy, a specialist in graphic image processing and 3D modeling, puts a vintage Pontiac hardtop through its paces and we all get to go along for a very wild ride.
LaBrooy is a graduate of the prestigious Royal College of Art in London, England, and as such he was looking for new sources of stimulation while on a recent visit to New York City. He found all that and more, with the principal inspiration for what would be known as “Automotive Aerobics” coming from a late-afternoon visit to Brooklyn.
As luck would have it, the gritty city streets were deserted except for a weather-beaten 1968 Pontiac hardtop coupe parked just outside a leaf-strewn basketball court.
You can spy the gold-painted Poncho in the background of some of the series’ images but it’s what LaBrooy does with the old cruiser that fortifies his claim to fame.
Madly wielding all the weapons in his digital graphics toolbox, LaBrooy makes the sixties land yacht look like new while adding indulgences like vinyl roofs of various contrasting and/or complementary shades. He also reverse-chops & channels the car, turning it into a gravity-defying automotive Mobius Strip that can match morphs with any top Terminator!
Obviously a fan of classic American iron, LaBrooy chooses the liberties he takes carefully: his subject retains its original styling cues, badges, nameplates and wheelcovers.
It’s this beautiful yet vaguely disturbing confluence of reality and virtuality that imbues LaBrooy’s imagery with the atmosphere of a hallucination. Perhaps his choice of a ’68 Pontiac for this artistic flashback is in no way coincidental. (all images © copyright 2014 christopher labrooy)
