12.09. - 29.11.2025
Rämistrasse 35
CH-8001 Zurich
Switzerland
Jaguar, Ferrari and RAM. Three car brands, three animal symbols. From there, the question arises: how can we still conceive of landscape when all that remains of the world is a brittle wasteland of performance and status, of surface and exhaustion? Warp Drive lacquers its animals, drives through territories mirrored in chrome steel, and invites us to reflect on the world and its remnants.
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It is the hood ornaments of well-known car manufacturers that make the world in Warp Drive experienceable. Jason Rohr prompts reflection on a fragmented reality that reveals itself as a distorted and mirrored world in motifs such as suburban ennui (Point of Departure), a burning building (Lack forever) and a cemetery (Poser’s Penalty). However, this often multiply mediated, already ever-depicted reality is by no means to be understood as a dystopian design, nor is it a nostalgic call to return to pre-industrial landscape pastoral kitsch. Warp Drive is a journey through meta-landscapes; through images of a self-reflecting world that constantly reflects the possibilities and limitations of that very mirroring.
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Jason Rohr’s landscapes bulge distorted in the hood ornaments. Devoured, barren and worn out, they exist only on the surfaces of the machines that shaped, altered and destroyed them. Warp Drive shows the environment not as it ought to be, but as it is: a hyper-artificial un-world warped beyond recognition by consumer capitalism’s relentless engine, perpetually motorised, mirrored and alienating.
The new landscapes leak, revealing traces of the artist’s inner world. A flow of drive and force: an artistic process born from a sense of lack. A glimpse into the depths, or just another coat of lacquer on chrome?
Text by Luan Berisha
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