Me and my Truck items, 2006


Objects with found images from a Google search on “Me and my truck”.

Installation view from the exhibition Sugar Things at Rhys Gallery, Boston, 2006/07.

Excerpts from the exhibition text by Heidi Hove Pedersen: "After a visit to a local Truck Festival i The San Francisco Bay Area, California, and a Google search on the Internet with hundreds of images of people posing in front of their trucks, I decided to take a closer look at this phenomenon. People are expressing themselves through the vehicles. They are modifying their vehicle in such a way that it fits to their temperament and looks. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton write in the essay What things are for that the power object has much more than the enormous symbolic significance: An expression of Eros in the broadest sense, a need to demonstrate that one is alive, that one matters, that one makes a difference in the world. I am interested in how people promote themselves and in the way they increase their visibility in the world by belonging to a group or by standing out.

For this exhibition, the images from the Internet is being used for matchboxes, keychains, and posters. Through time these items have been used for advertisement. The “free” information and images from the Internet is now being transformed into something “real” in order to change the meaning or perception of how we look at it. One example is the poster series called: Chez, Chelsea, Devy, Kristen, Kris, Matt, Mickey, Nathan, Noah, Sherri, Jana, Chris, CJ, Darren, Jonko, Joseph, Ling, Paul, Vinch and George which are images from the Google search that have simply been enlarged. The Match Trucks x 98 also relates to the Matchbox™ - a collector’s item and toy. Next to or inside the Matchbox, you will find a small match model of the depicted truck on the outside. Each truck is personalized and handmade. They refer to the fire and burning wheels which seem to be an ongoing theme within the truck culture. Also the size of the trucks play an important role, and some of the trucks don’t even fit in the box anymore. The usually masculine and heavy trucks are now transformed into something “easy destroyable”, small, and toy-look-a-like".