[Aerial shot] Three cars—pink, green and blue—slide into the curve, their plastic wheels slicing through the wet asphalt in a choreographed hesitation, spinning out in an almost perfectly mastered hydroplaning—a near-failure, a half-rehearsal, a moment stretched thin between grip and release. [Close-up] A dog. Submissive bystander? Active participant? Either way, its fur ripples in the wind as it watches, tracking the movements as if attempting to make sense of the absurd ballet unfolding before it. The Michelin wet handling ring, reserved for full size machines and big money, now plays host to this surreal choreography of children’s cars, their presence both ridiculous and oddly graceful. It is an arena of absurd repetition, of skidding and correction, of something like control but not quite. A car wavers, corrects, wavers again. The dance continues, unlearning mastery in pursuit of something closer to instinct. Here, the machines flirt with uncertainty, tracing loops of defiance—somewhere between play and precision, between a game and something unknowingly serious.
But this is only what would have taken place—what might have unfolded in a video dreamt up by artist Dani Reynolds, had Michelin agreed to let us film on their wet handling track. Instead, these cars—once motorized toy cars for children—have been reimagined, altered. No longer bound to a linear trajectory of forward and backward, they now spin freely, set atop office chair wheels, their movement untethered, directionless, ecstatic. Their surfaces, given a glow up through layers of papier-mâché and silver gargoyle emblems, seem at once ornamental and defiant, relics of a mythology that never existed. And so they find themselves not skimming over a slick test track but instead staged in a space that once housed a flower shop and, before that, a hair salon—now evoking the setup of an ambiguous commercial space, yet never fully resolving into one. On the walls, two paintings on latex depict different images of dogs with varying hairstyles, reminiscent of the styling guides often found in the local salon. Michelin, hair salons, flowers, dogs—associations that at first seem absurd but instead reveal a braid of the city’s history and its shifting spaces and inhabitants, traced and unraveled by Dani Reynolds during their second residency in Clermont-Ferrand.[1]
Over the course of three weeks, Dani Reynolds worked onsite, chipping away paint from previously hidden mirrors, applying gestures reminiscent of a hairstylist, florist, or dog groomer—trimming back the space’s invisible hair to revive it, revealing and framing its charming imperfections. Disparate elements, plucked from their typical contexts, are now presented in a dizzying yet humorous arrangement (think bouquet), or score. The choreographic and performative aspects of these professions are reflected in Dani’s practice, where they orchestrate moments that simultaneously engage with the sincerity of failure while recalling the looping nature of uneasiness and obsession, like the doom scroll.
This looping nature appears in the TikTok-esque video playing on repeat from an iPhone stuck onto a mirror via an influencer must-have suction pad. Reminiscent of Canine Choreography—a performance Dani produced in which the artist danced with four-legged creatures—the video presented here questions the nature of the companion species. Rather than a choreography between human and dog, the choreography here unfolds between human and a 360-spinning, papier-mâché-covered, automatic toy car mounted atop office chair wheels. This video reflects the idea of thrown projections—both through the act of performance itself and through the mediated lens of social media. A thrown projection is, after all, a construct that enacts the same principle twice over—the projection of a projection, or the thrownness of something already thrown[2]—and in this way, both domesticated companions and social media platforms serve as reflections of this recursive logic, absorbing and refracting human desires, anxieties, and performances back at us.
The serious expression, the dryness of the performer’s stare, brings us, finally, to the title: Fluff Dry. Borrowed from the dog grooming term describing the process of using a dryer to blow air into a dog’s coat while simultaneously fluffing the hair to create volume and fullness, the exhibition mirrors this act—offering a full and voluminous vision into the practice of an artist who has been the holder of the Guinness World Record for creating the world’s widest wig[3], an amateur dog trainer, and a miniature enthusiast.
[1] Dani Reynolds previously participated in the 100 day residency proposed by Artistes en résidece in 2022-2023
[2] See Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings, Harvard University Press, 2005, p. 220.
[3] World’s Widest Wig Work, 2022
