[b] If anyone has not heard, there is an exhibit that started today in NYC examining
the life and death of KO-Motion's owner Charlie "Astoria Chas" Snyder .
It is a work of Collier Schorr, Marty Schorr's daughter.
It looks interesting and worth a trip into the City!
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This article is in this weeks Old Cars Weekly
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This is an excerpt from her press release
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The exhibition There I Was, by Collier Schorr, looks to America and specifically the muscle car
counter culture of the 1960s in Long Island and Queens, NY.
This history is related through the short but spectacular life of charismatic 21-year-old
drag car racer Charlie "Astoria Chas” Synder and his '67 "Ko-Motion" Corvette. At the age of 5
Schorr accompanied her father Martyn Schorr, a photographer
and journalist to a local racetrack where she watched Astoria Chas work on his car.
A subsequent article followed in CARS Magazine, with the now eerie headline
“While Astoria Chas is doing his thing in Vietnam his friends are racing his L-88."
By the time the article was published Charlie had already been killed overseas.
There I Was is Snyder's story and Schorr's dilemma. He was there; she was not.
The project examines the role of the photograph as proof of the photographer's presence,
territory and view and the difficulty of representing any past without the theatricality of
re-staging it. Using a collision of source materials for the drawings beginning with her father's
images and Snyder's own snapshots taken in Vietnam, Schorr then draws from
“professional” reportage pictures, so as to describe, literally sketch out, one monumental trip
from Queens, NY to Vietnam and back. Thus conjuring up an expressionistic portrait of the
dichotomies of late-1960s America.
These dichotomies are echoed in the formal tropes the work bounces between, from gestural
strokes to hard-edged, almost woodcut-like pencil renderings depending on the tone and
subject matter of the pictures.
Machine Gun Dedication,an image of a buddy posing for Snyder, contrasts a drawing of a
blissful Snyder, posing for the artist’s father, reaching into the engine compartment of his racecar.
Drawing K, in which an unknown figure is frantic, wearing a blood-splattered shirt, foreshadows
the portrait of a uniformed Snyder fresh from jump school and visiting his mother’s candy store
in Astoria, NY. These discordant frictions between pain and bravado and tranquility and chaos
add up to a complex and multi-faceted portrait of escape, culture, dreams and mortality in a
fractured wartime America.
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