The Brooklyn Rail

Flint, Michigan native Ash Arder’s single-room exhibition, Flesh Tones, is a rhizomatic exploration of the relationship between the artist, her family, and the automotive industry. A focal point of the project is a baby shower Arder’s parents threw at the General Motors Buick City Plant in Flint, where they both worked and which the artist attended in utero. Within a year, Arder’s mother would be dead, and the artist would be raised by her father, waking each weekday at four a.m. to go to childcare so that her father could start his shift at the plant.

Occupying the gallery’s rear wall is a slowly unfolding video projection created from a photo of Arder’s parents and co-workers gathered around food and drink in front of an overhead conveyor carrying sheet metal door parts. Arder animates the static image by cyclically revealing and hiding elements of the photo, grouping them by the type of material and its relationship to her parents. The sequence and duration of each reveal are linked to the material in question’s physical permanence: for example, a person’s jewelry, being made of metal, might outlast the person herself. But an object’s physical permanence might also reflect how persistently something remains in a family’s collective memory, connecting the video to Arder’s experience researching the show.

For this exhibition, Arder collaborated with fellow Flint native and Underground Resistance affiliate Huey Mnemonic to create a sonic interpretation of a narrative prompt provided by the artist: "it’s fall of 1987, my mother walks into Buick City, probably saying hello to people, and proceeds to her baby shower." Over its approximately twenty-minute duration, Mnemonic’s piece combines heartbeat-like pulses, warm ambient drones, and simple repetitive melodies with an "exterior" soundscape of voices, music, and occasionally booming lower-end sounds. Together, these sonic elements intuitively but convincingly invoke the environmental sound of an automotive plant as it might appear to a listener suspended in amniotic fluid.

Mnemonic’s soundtrack emerges from beneath a sculptural work that includes a video monitor embedded in the interior of a gold passenger-side door. The video concatenates sonograms of Arder in her mother’s womb with footage of computer simulations and non-contact measurements of the dynamic response of a car door to excitation frequencies. The video also includes found cinematic footage of a 1987-era Cadillac Sedan, a vehicle that Arder’s parents owned, and which the artist says epitomized the "respectability politics" that a union job, and consequent middle-class lifestyle, represented in the Black community of "a GM company town."

Growing up the daughter of a single parent, Arder remembers the Cadillac as a "second home," a safe space to wait when her father hit the store for groceries, as well as the first place she remembers listening to music. Many people establish emotional connections with a childhood vehicle, but Arder’s juxtaposition of the womb and the car door implies that this relationship can be yet more profoundly formative in car-building cultures like Flint. Here, parents talk differently about cars because they’ve designed or made part of them.

While researching her parents’ lives, Arder was given the iconic hood ornament from her father’s Cadillac. She subsequently cast replicas in chocolate, butter, and shea butter, which she used in rituals involving objects related to her parents. During this process, the Cadillac emblems inevitably melted away. In conversation, Arder talks about how powerful these performances became for her and how she felt her parents’ presence through them. Although fundamentally ephemeral, the ritual performances do appear in the show through a line of four black-and-white photos.

A set of chocolate, butter, and shea butter hood ornaments also appear in a refrigerated display case, powered by a battery pack charged by solar panels on the museum’s roof. There is a neat conceptual link here, in the act of making cultural artifacts of the automotive age dependent on renewable energy. However, Arder, who runs a business providing solar power for live events, is interested in more than the concept; she wants to prove to the museum, in practical terms, that it could use renewable energy as well.

The battery is stored in a side room with a window looking out onto the museum grounds. Arder consciously leaves the door open as a symbolic crack in the museum industry’s general resistance to adopting more environmentally sustainable practices. But an open door can also symbolize a way forward. For Arder, who is now roughly the age at which her mother passed away and is thinking about what her own legacy might be, the open door points toward an environmentally sustainable future. In that spirit, she sees this exhibition as a moment to simultaneously “channel her parents’ automotive plant love story” while “softly releasing herself” from her family’s allegiance to an environmentally destructive industry, albeit one that has provided them, and other Black families, with a solid middle-class livelihood.