Justine Kurland’s Haunting Photographs of Men and Cars

For more than a decade, Justine Kurland has taken photographs during annual cross-country journeys from New York to the Pacific Northwest that reveal the double-edged nature of the American dream. A lifelong nomad (she grew up traveling to Renaissance festivals, where her mother sold hand-sewn clothes), her tools are her 4×5 camera and her van, which allow her to dwell, briefly, in the worlds of the marginal figures she photographs. First, there were the girls she cast as runaways, forging into forests and swimming holes. Later came images of commune members in wilderness idylls and panoramas of westbound freighters and the hobos who ride them.

Tomorrow, Kurland’s first New York solo exhibition in five years, “Sincere Auto Care,” opens at Mitchell-Innes & Nash. Named after a Nebraska garage, it explores the culture of cars and the men who drive and work on them. A disembodied wrist rests on a rusted hood, cradling a cigarette; a teenager loiters by a sign that reads “No Loitering”; tattooed mechanics bend over their work. And yet in the mix of paint, chrome and grime that coats these scenes, a beautiful order prevails, in the symmetry of used tires hung on hooks, the fantasy of a pair of ferocious tigers painted on a hood and the way one part of a motor fits into another.