WILL YOU WIN THE VISIONAIRE RACE?

WILL YOU WIN THE VISIONAIRE RACE?

Visionaire and Cadillac invite you to race on the largest mini4wd racing track on the East Coast!

Construct! Create! and Compete!

With high-speed, thrilling fun, VISIONAIRE Racing is the new, action-packed, interactive exhibition at The Gallery at Cadillac House. Based on the 1980s Japanese, cult miniature 4WD model-making and racing competitions, VISIONAIRE brings its own artistic and curatorial twist to the construction and the sport of miniature car racing. In keeping with traditional “Mini Yonku” racing, both novice and professional racers as well as visitors to Cadillac House are invited to CONSTRUCT (car kits are available for purchase), CREATE (with an array of colorful embellishments) and COMPETE on the East Coast’s largest Mini4wd racing track.

Traditionally, this international phenomenon is about speed, along with personal expression and style. VISIONAIRE Racing and Cadillac’s approach is focused on individuals creativity in both racing and artistic expression. Participants can decorate their own Mini4WD race cars, taking inspiration from Artist Cars on display by Tom Sachs, Marilyn Minter, Virgil Abloh, Laurie Simmons, Nicola Formichetti, Will Cotton, Kristin Baker, Heron Preston, Liz Cohen, Ryan McNamara, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Justin Adian, Bill Powers, Modem, Toland Grinnell, Jon Kessler, Van Neistat, Bob Rubin, Giacomo Di Mura, and more.

Even race car driver Jordan Taylor of Cadillac racing, winner of the 2017 IMSA Weather-Tech DPi driver championship, has decorated a miniature car included in the installation.

Guests are encouraged to let their imagination race!

As The Gallery at Cadillac House transforms into the largest Mini4wd racing track on the East Coast, so, too, will the vehicles on display. For the duration of the installation, Cadillac’s ATS-VR Racing Sportscar, which was driven in the 2017 Pirelli World Challenge Sprintx Championship, will be on display. The brand will also be displaying new colors for the CTS-V Series including the Glacier Metallic CTS-V and the Vector Blue CTS-V, which will be on the runway at Cadillac House from November 15 through early December.

The track is open for racing everyday from 12pm until close (call 212.418.3477 for holiday hours). There will be qualifying competitions on select Sundays (12/3, 12/10. 12/17) with a Grand Finale Race on 1/7. Visitors can bring their own Tamiya Mini4WD cars, buy cars on site to race and keep, or race and return one of the available cars. Racing is free and open to the public.

SUNDAY RACING COMPETITIONS

There will be tournaments on Sunday Dec 3, Dec 10, and Dec 17 to qualify for the Grand Finale on Jan 7, 2018. Professional racers may bring their own cars.

Stock Class cars must be based on Box Stock motor, chassis, wheels, rollers, and fundamental mechanical components. Mixed box kits and artistic embellishment allowed (and encouraged!).

Modified Class cars to follow strict Tamiya Japan Cup rules tamiya.com/english/mini4wd/regulation.htm>. Series motors are the highest level of engine allowed. All cars may be inspected after the races are complete, inside and out, and may be subject to dismissal if infractions of the rules are discovered. You may bring your own Tamiya Mini4wd car and batteries, there is no fee for race entry or use of the circuit. Mini4wd Stock Kits, and Alkaline AA batteries will be available for sale on site.

Sunday Qualifying Races: 12/3, 12/10, 12/17 Grand Finale SHOWDOWN: 1/7

THE RACE Track opens at noon— THE First race WILL BEGIN at 1pm
@VISIONAIREWORLD #CADILLACHOUSE @CADILLAC #VISRACING #MINI4Wd

VIRGIL ABLOH is a creative designer, DJ, and the founder of the Milan-based fashion label Off-White. After receiving his Masters in Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Abloh was art director for the 2011 Jay-Z / Kanye West album Watch the Throne, for which he was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Recording Package. In 2014, Abloh started Off-White, offering high-end men’s and women’s collections. For Visionaire RACING, Abloh air-brushed his miniature race car a creamsicle orange with the name “Lee” written on it.

JUSTIN ADIAN’s artworks exist within the realms of both painting and sculpture, becoming experiments of two and three dimensional entities. His style originated from his failure to sculpt a piece of foam he found outside his studio, so he instead trusted his painterly origin and wrapped it in a painted surface. This technique is the core of much of his work today. For Visionaire RACING, Adian transforms a hard angular mechanical into an amorphous soft-edged creature that he calls “GWAR” which he describes as “a cuttlefish egg alien.”

KORAKRIT ARUNANONDCHAI is a multimedia artist working in film, photography, sculpture, installation, apparel, poetry, painting, music, and performance. Drawing from his family members and his current research in natural sciences and technology, Krit (as he is known) works with the idea of animism as framed both the near future and a distant past. For Visionaire RACING, Krit created a hybrid creature made as a by-product of his consumption of the natural world.

KRISTIN BAKER’s style and composition of shapes and colors and her use of contemporary materials are heavily inspired by motor racing and the concept of ‘accident and consequence’ which were subsequently interpreted into bold paint strokes. For Visionaire RACING, Baker draws on her inspiration for cars, American capitalism, and advertising to create a slick bold colorful race car.

LIZ COHEN is a performance artist and automotive designer, currently teaching at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. Cohen is most notable for her BODYWORK project that transformed an East German 1987 Trabant automobile into a 1973 Chevrolet El Camino, complete with iconographic sexy babe photography. For Visionaire RACING, Cohen dressed her tiny toy car as a “MONStr trck” complete with an evil, albeit adorable, personality.

WILL COTTON’s themes of desire and fulfillment translate into landscapes of sugary treats and baked goods, referencing consumerism and commercial advertising. Cotton’s cotton-candy inspiration has manifested itself in large-scale oil paintings, photos, sculpture, a functioning bakery, and costume and set design for singer Katy Perry. For Visionaire RACING, Cotton transforms a decidedly inedible race car into a mouth-watering gold-wrapped Hershey’s kiss.

NICOLA FORMICHETTI is the Global Artistic Director for Diesel and Creative Director at Uniqlo. He is responsible for some of Lady Gaga’s most iconic looks including the infamous MTV meat dress. Formichetti’s 2-year old brand, Nicopanda, offers genderless high concept streetwear. For Visionaire RACING, Formichetti and Nicopanda transformed a typical toy car into a sexy metallic-finish racing machine with a surprise custom hood ornament.

TOLAND GRINNELL is a sculptor playing within the grey area of creative expression and consumerism, high art and high fashion. For Visionaire RACING, Grinnell took an alternate approach heightening the potential of the car by deconstructing it. Mounting the individual parts for the viewers eyes and including the tools necessary to reassemble and race the car increases the possibility that physically touching it would make it more exciting.

JON KESSLER makes sculptures with complex kinetic parts and intricately built structures. His art taps into the frenzy of modern existence, with touches of humor and kitsch. Based on claims that a fidget spinner can be used to help calm people down who suffer from anxiety and other neurological disorders, Kessler fittingly attached a fidget spinner to the top of his miniature race car for Visionaire RACING, thereby alleviating any race day anxieties.

RYAN MCNAMARA is a performance artist focused on dance, though he is not a trained dancer himself. His debut piece and ‘first dance class’ was titled “Make Ryan a Dancer” at MoMa PS1 in 2010. His work revolves around people and is often interactive. For his most ambitious production to date, ME3M, each audience member was wheeled around an entire theatre to watch multiple performances. For Visionaire RACING, McNamara made “Van Go!”: a miniature race car featuring a hand-made plastic ear.

MARILYN MINTER explores the relationship between glamour and female sexuality in her large-scale photo-realistic paintings, photos, and videos. Though much of her work comes across as slick, her work is usually hand-finished with finger blending, adding a tactile quality to her images. For Visionaire RACING, Minter uses her miniature car as a vehicle to communicate women’s rights and women’s empowerment.

MODEM is Kathryn Moll and Nicholas de Monchaux, a creative practice based in Oakland, CA. Kathryn Moll is an architect and Nicholas de Monchaux is Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at UC Berkeley, where he is currently Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media. For Visionaire RACING, Moll and de Monchaux created a creature at once familiar and foreign: it could be from outer space or perhaps the future, it looks like an animal, but is all machine.

GIACOMO DI MURO aka GIACA WHATEVER is a web serial entrepreneur who started his YouTube venture during a sabbatical year. “I started this venture to share things I make that you can actually touch unlike my web products,” he said. For Visionaire RACING, Di Muro created a toothy cyclops creature, at once horrifying and strangely adorable.

VAN NEISTAT is a filmmaker who lives in New York and Los Angeles. Neistat has collaborated with artist Tom Sachs on many short documentaries, instructional art videos, and feature-length films including “A Space Program”, and, most recently, “The Hero’s Journey.” For Visionaire RACING, Neistat transformed his race car into Ratcatcher, featuring a mouse stuffed and posed by Paige Higgins, a professional taxidermist in Baton Rouge.

BILL POWERS founded Half Gallery in 2008. He is an editor-at-large for Purple Fashion Magazine. In 2013, Gagosian published a collection of his profiles “Interviews with Artists.” Powers also formed Exhibition A which offers limited-run prints and objects by blue chip artists and writes for ARTnews. For Visionaire RACING, Powers honors his gallery with “1/2” sharpied on his car body and colorful geometric shapes exploding from all sides.

HERON PRESTON is an artist, creative director, content creator, DJ, and designer of his eponymous streetwear label. He has also collaborated with Nike, Virgil Abloh, and Kanye West. For Visionaire RACING, Preston be-dazzled his miniature race car with Swarovski crystals making it both luxe and accessible.

BOB RUBIN, a former Wall Streeter, transformed his Visionaire RACING car into a rolling billboard for his three passions –cars, golf, and art– as they intersect as his idiosyncratic high end golf club, The Bridge. The Gulf Oil racing logo becomes “Golf,” and Richard Prince’s skull bunny — itself an appropriation of another well known corporate symbol — is likewise given a new twist. While waiting for the checkered flag to drop, you can practice putting on the astroturfed rear decks of this formidable machine.

TOM SACHS calls his art “bricolage”: a constant reworking and reinterpretation of found objects and accessible materials handmade into something new. Sachs’ work often exposes the artistic process, celebrating imperfections with globules of glue, roughly-cut foam, and found wood becoming as much a part of the art piece as the message behind it. Sachs has long been obsessed with space as seen by his rocket-powered miniature car for Visionaire RACING.

LAURIE SIMMONS is a photographer and filmmaker. She often stages scenes of dolls, ventriloquist dummies, miniature objects on legs, and miniature furniture. For Visionaire RACING, Simmons used her miniature race car to send a message: Resist.