Slow Motion Destruction

The Brooklyn-based artist Jonathan Schipper has an interesting and slightly disturbing body of work. Trying to avoid the artspeak on his website, I'd say some of his work focuses on the physics of destruction and attempts to let us experience it at different time scales, slowing it down and/or repeating it endlessly. To this end, he engineers complex apparatus. His website makes for difficult direct linking, but most of the works on this page have videos attached.

This piece breaks and reassembles a tea cup in a slow dance, using an outsized machine that contrasts nicely with the dainty china.

In this large-scale piece, two muscle cars from the '70s slowly approached and crashed into each other over a period of one month. Lots of people see i as a metaphor for the death of the US auto industry, but I think he just liked the idea of crashing cars into each other.