ASS, CASH, & GRASS

Ellen O’Shea, Will Zeng

June 7 - 29, 2025

In ASS, GRASS, & CASH, Ellen O’Shea and Will Zeng explore the politics of desire, gender as social conditioning, and how we establish identities through consumption through the imagery of and objects surrounding car culture. 

The exhibition features O’Shea’s larger-than-life sculpture of the iconic “mudflap girl” logo—a reflective silhouette of a reclining woman. By combining the mirror and the shape of a female figure, O’Shea’s work highlights the power, pleasure, and misogyny inherent in the gaze. In BOYRACER, Zeng takes compositional inspiration from a photo of supermodel Devon Aoki sitting on the hood of a car. BOYRACER replaces the image of Aoki with a male figure, transforming the sensuality and assumed heterosexuality of fetishized car models into a homoerotic. By setting the figure and the car in a pastoral backdrop, the painting frames the redirection of pleasure towards the male body as potentially utopic. Both works take seriously how desire and objecthood function in relation to gender. 

Invested in kitsch and bad taste, the artists highlight how car ornamentation becomes a commercialized and aestheticized form of identity. Throughout ASS, GRASS, AND CASH, O’Shea inserts framed vanity plates and car paraphernalia, emblazoned with phrases popular in the early 2000’s that reflect the language used toward women’s bodies. Through these kitschy, gendered symbols, she critiques a male-dominated culture, capturing the attitudes of a moment. Zeng takes Asian patterns from ceramics and textiles, often read as excessive, and puts them on automobiles. The older form of ornamentation on the car form complicates the car as a symbol of the futuristic, modern, slick, and masculine. Through the ornamentation, the car becomes racialized and further draws the connection between car and body.

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