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For the better part of the past three years, thirty-four-year-old photographer Liz Cohen has been holed up inside Phoenix, Arizona's Elwood Bodyworks fusing together a most unlikely automobile. Part "Pimp My Ride" part "Transformers," Cohen is giving birth to something altogether new, a low-rider that, using a series of hydraulic pumps, morphs back and forth between an East German Trabant, and a Chevrolet El Camino.
The East-meets-West hybrid is just one of several makeovers contained in "Bodyworks," Cohen's latest mixed-media piece. When she began the project in San Francisco (where she also earned an MFA from the California College for the Arts), Cohen's knowledge of restoring and customizing automobiles was non-existent. Since then, she has learned and executed nearly every step of the process required to fabricate her bizarre cruising anomaly. Perhaps an even more improbable mutation, however, has been the artist's foray into the world of low-rider bikini modeling. In a series of arresting images—some of which are currently on-view at Santa Fe, New Mexico's Center for Contemporary Art—the mechanic prowls on the hood of her creation, or wields dangerous-looking power tools. To attain her desired physical appearance, she instituted a rigorous weight-training program, and adheres to a high-protein diet that helps bring out the definition and curves in her otherwise skinny frame.
An intersection of high art conceptualism and Lowrider credibility, "Bodyworks" turns out to be much more than an ironic, iconoclastic mash-up. As Cohen herself explains, the ideas behind the piece are anything but superficial.
Men's Vogue: "Bodywork" explores a series of transformations: Trabant into a Chevy El Camino, artist into bikini model, Communism into Capitalism, layperson into specialized auto mechanic. What specifically drew you to the subject of mutation?
Liz Cohen: My parents are immigrants. I'm first generation American. My parents came from very different backgrounds; my father from an Orthodox Jewish Family that was Syrian. My mom is from Catholic family in Colombia. They came to this country and had to adapt and change. I think I grew up being a little different that the people around me. But I think that people go through these changes all the time. They enter eighth grade and they're kind of dorky, and then they enter high school and they're suddenly Goth. People migrate from cultures or subcultures or jobs and I think it poses an interesting challenge for the way that people relate to each other. And I'm interested in the kind of delineation of people in groups, and what the limits are of their membership, like how far can you stretch the boundaries. How much room is there for the weirdo before it doesn't make sense to call it a group anymore.
