Local artist Dustin Shuler makes art of disassembled cars and displays them like trophies, either on decorative wood mounts, like those holding deer heads, or as animal pelts splayed out flat on the gallery floor or hanging on the wall.
How do you get a flat car? The wall-mounted piece, "Porsche Pelt," is illustrative. Shuler takes the "skin" of the car, its bright red shell of hood, fenders, doors, roof, windows and cuts these into manageable squares that don't completely lose their volume but are small enough to be affixed to one another by wire like a metal patchwork quilt. The same fate meets "Tiger Pelt," a nearly complete LAPD car pieced on the gallery floor like a prize rug. In another work, two long 1959 Cadillac fins mounted totemically mimic a fisherman's record catch.
