Tora Schultz at Overgaden

Schultz’s entirely new body of work created for her exhibition Bitch on Wheels spans the automotive industry and bentwood design with materials including a crash test dummy, an apple, strappings, domestic interiors, and public barriers. Across this spectrum, frozen or motionless moments are central: the numb body of the dummy; wood forced into static, curved shapes; the tied-up torso; and, metaphorically, the stale rigidity of typification.

Formally, Schultz pulls apart the objects that furnish our society, as actual furniture as well as warped social structures. In Schultz’s hands objects are, quite literally, broken down to their constituent parts and then remodeled, exposing the power structures that shaped them in the first place.

One sculptural series employs the popular EVA-chair, crafted in bentwood by the heralded Swedish modernist designer Bruno Mathsson. Schultz reconfigures a chair, in one instance, by stripping it of its woven seat, leaving its skeleton naked, and crossing the armrests so they appear to be tied-up or covering itself. In other instances, the chair is animated by fastening it with a seatbelt or putting shoes on it. Another series consists of galvanized steel sculptures that reference standard traffic barriers, subtly adjusted to offer softer, curved shapes that simulate the headboard of a double bed.

A repeating trope across Schultz’s new work is the figure “Eva” (the Danish spelling of Eve). Alongside the EVA-chair, another “Eva” is the EvaRID, an unused prototype, yet the first crash test dummy developed to ensure vehicle safety beyond a standardized male body. Summed up, the assemblage of restructured materials humorously rebukes the stereotypical profiling of empowered females as ill-tempered, vampish, and uncontrollable “bitches on wheels.”