CHRIS DOBROWOLSKI
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Washed up car-go (Reviews)


​Click this button for 'British Council' review
British Council
​Corridor8
01.05.2017  — (this link will take you to the original whole article that that includes 'Somewhere becoming sea') Review
​
 Chris Dobrowolski: Washed Up Car-go
Hull 2017 UK City of Culture -@ The Deep, Hull
​by Derek Horton

Picture
A short walk around the dock from Humber Street Gallery, across the footbridge at the confluence of the River Hull and the River Humber, things are more cheerful, but no less thought provoking. Three very ordinary hatchback cars, scattered amongst the others in the car park of The Deep, Hull’s aquarium tourist attraction, could easily be missed without the tell-tale sign of variously bemused and captivated visitors peering through their windows. The cars form the three separate but related parts of Chris Dobrowolski’s Washed Up Car-go (2017). Each is filled with sand, pebbles and washed-up tideline detritus to windscreen height, creating a in-car beach where a reproduction painting is partially buried. A short film is projected on the reverse of each painting, with a classical music soundtrack from the operatic works of Carl Orff, both triggered by motion sensors as you approach the car.

The childhood experience of holding a conch shell to your ear to hear the sound of the sea is wittily subverted by using conch shells to conceal the loudspeakers through which the music is amplified. A toy version of each car sits on the beach that fills the real car and the films are beamed from tiny projectors under the sand via a periscopic mirror on the underside of each toy cars’ raised hatchback. Such playful ingenuity is evident in much of Dobrowolski’s previous work, but the metaphorical subtleties of the films’ narratives and the art historical references of the paintings against which we see them, introduce new levels of sophistication to his exploration of real and imagined journeys.

The screens are small and the big skies of the flat Humberside coast create reflections in the car windows that can make the films difficult to see. Holding your hand against the glass to compensate and peering intently through somehow intensifies the experience though, and such attentive looking is rewarded by the multi-layered narratives it reveals. A miniature makeshift raft bears as its cargo a small reproduction of Géricault’s ‘Raft of the Medusa’ (1818-19), floating calmly at first on the River Humber, which is suddenly overcome by waves and capsized. The reference to media images of the perilous journeys of refugees is overt, but is then undercut by the comedy of the raft being winched ashore by a rope and the gradual revelation that this is by means of the rope being wound around an oar attached to the slowly rotating wheel of a car, the same car that you are now peering through the windows of to watch the scene unfold.

In the second car, the film shows a model of a Chinese shipping container floating under the Humber Bridge. It runs aground and is revealed to be full of a cargo of plastic and rubber toys, sea creatures of all sorts. The biblical story of Jonah comes to mind as we briefly see a knife in Dobrowolski’s hand slicing open the belly of a (rubber toy) whale from which a toy car emerges. Again, it is the very toy car that contains the miniature projector and the mirror through which you are watching the film, on the reverse of a reproduction of Rubens’ ‘The Union of Earth and Water’ (1618), showing a boy blowing into a conch shell, mimicking the music emerging from the conch shells in the car.
​
The third car contains a small copy of Herbert James Draper’s ‘Ulysses and the Sirens’ (1909), a painting found in Hull’s Ferens Art Gallery. Its reverse is the screen for a film featuring three of Dobrowolski’s sirens, washed-up Barbie dolls on the banks of the Humber. The dolls have all-seeing minicam heads and have become mermaids, their legs disappeared inside real fish tails. The wit and ingenuity Dobrowolski brings to all his work are very evident in Washed Up Car-go, but this playfulness does nothing to detract from the seriousness of his concern with marine pollution, consumerism and the dangers of a globalised economy.

​Click this button for the 'Washed up Car-go' page
Washed up Car-go
  • Home
  • in the art gallery
    • Transit Transition >
      • Train Wave
      • The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner
      • Self Evaluation
      • something About Global Capitalism But Less Ernest
      • The Man From Human Resources Is Coming to See You
      • The Ofsted Inspection
      • The Risk Assessment
      • Personal development training day
      • My Matchbox Toy Lorry
      • The Zero Hours Contract
      • The Plinth
    • Remnants Of Utopia >
      • Austerity Miniature Mayday Parade
      • The Contract
      • Agitprop/anti-agitprop Train
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      • How We Won The War
      • Revolutionary Reminder
      • The Marketing Team
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      • Project Outline
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      • Rejection Letters
      • The Last Roll Of Kodachrome In The World
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      • "Don't Make Me Take It All Back Home With Me!"
      • How We Won The War
      • "Stop me and buy one!"
      • 'The Cornfield'... free gift inside
      • "Catalogue!"
      • The Contemporary Art Scene
      • Camera Crash
      • "Untitled" hanging itself
      • Buy My Fucking Painting!
      • Absolut Ship !
      • Executive Toy!
      • Art Stunt Suicide Disaster
      • Roll up, Roll up. Get your Art here!
    • Big Country >
      • Big Country
      • The box you stick your head into
      • Europa, Hoek van Holland to Vladivostok
      • Caravans
      • magazine article
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    • & Model >
      • Reviews
    • Give Me The Money
    • Music and domestic appliances >
      • Sketch for aeroplane
      • The Plinth
      • Cold War Monument
      • Wagon Wheels
      • Vacuum Cleaner Circle
    • ...on the wall...in boxes >
      • My Shitty Studio No.2
      • Sketch for aeroplane No.6
      • Landscape, Seascape, Skyscape, Fire Escape
      • My horrible studio No.1
      • Untitled 240 Volts
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      • Toy Me No.2
      • It's for you
    • Sweet Jars, glass cases on books >
      • Thatcher
      • The council estate is coming
      • Attack drone and books
      • Muck Spreader
      • Trojan Horse
      • Security Camera
      • Move
      • Epsom Printer, Tank, God
      • Contemporary art- its the law!
      • Tank Caravans Paint Brush
      • Buy to Let
      • Section 21
  • On The Stage
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      • Project outline
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      • Project Outline
      • Reviews
    • Poland 3 Iran 2 >
      • Project Outline
      • Reviews
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      • Project Outline
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      • Boris zip wire
      • Covidtrix
      • what is the truth but a lie agreed upon
    • Goat Train
    • washed up Car - go >
      • Project Outline
      • Reviews
      • 'EK52 UDP'
      • 'VK02 GFK'
      • 'Y194 LPP'
      • Washed Up Car-go (Hastings)
      • Washed Up Car- go (Brighton)
    • Vanishing Point >
      • Project Outline
      • Reviews
      • Red Sports Car, East To West
      • Studebaker Camera Car, Going To The Beach
      • Kite And Candy, Buick
      • Kennedy Lincoln Continental
      • Ambulance Emergency
      • Pink Mustang, at the Golden Gate Bridge
      • Matchbox
      • Instant Gratification
    • Badgast Residency >
      • Short Essay
      • De Wrede Zee
      • Fish
      • Chips
      • Windmill
      • Panorama Mesdag
    • Selfie Slot Car Racing >
      • Project Outline
      • Film by Andy Wiltshire
      • Librarian Pit Crew
      • Experiments with sound
      • Selfie Slot Car Racing at Firstsite Gallery
      • Flitwick Library
    • Coventry Transport Museum Residency >
      • Coventry Concept
      • Poetry Vending Machine
    • Cheap Cheap >
      • Review
    • A Portrait of Casper DeBoer
    • Cranes
    • Hessle Road Residency >
      • Hessle Road (continued)
    • Reisbureau Mareado >
      • Mareado (Continued)
      • City magazine review
    • Windmills >
      • Aerial, wind, sun and radio
      • Guitar Played by the Wind >
        • Winners and Losers
      • Self Portrait
      • Jesus punches banker
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      • The groundsman
      • All seeing bicycle lamp
      • Pasta 4 one
      • Revolutionary Reminder
  • publications
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      • Escape >
        • Read an Extract
      • Antarctica
      • Offer Must End Soon
      • Tangents
      • Landscape, Seascape, Skyscape , Escape
      • Aerial, wind, sun and radio
    • Group Projects >
      • oceans
      • Talk to me
      • & Model
      • Middlesbrough Art Weekender
      • Translating the Street
      • 1st Sino/british Cont. Art, Yentai
      • Performance, Transport And Mobility
      • Inbetween PS1, New York and Shanghai
      • Odd Coupling
      • Landscapes of Exploration
      • Flip Shift Show Switch
      • Baudrillard Now
      • The Juddykes
      • Dr Roberts Magic Bus
      • Continental Breakfast
      • Lat (living Apart Together)
      • North. Amsterdam 2004
      • Westwijk, Vlaardingen, De Strip
      • Da Da Da Strategies Against Marketecture
      • Reisburo Mareado (The Travel Brochure)
      • Catalogus Mareado
      • Kunst Over De Grens
      • This Flat Earth
      • The Uses of an Artist
      • Kettles Yard Open 97
      • Royal College Of Art Centenary Year
      • Millennium Encyclopedia
    • Press
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