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Icaruscar by Evann Siebens & Keith Doyle
New Gallery
Friday, January 9 - Saturday, February 14

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In 1949, Portland-born Navy pilot and aeronautical engineer Molt Taylor created the world’s first flying car — a little clunker with removable wings and tail called the Aerocar. His invention never made it into commercial production, however, as the hybrid was efficient neither on the road nor in the sky. After an initial courtship by automotive giant General Motors, the vehicle fell out of favour due to safety concerns and its lack of practicality. Although Taylor never gave up on his dream, his invention was ultimately relegated to obscurity.

IcarusCar, a multimedia installation by Evann Siebens and Keith H. Doyle on display at The New Gallery until February 14, pays homage to Taylor’s Aerocar. The installation documents the couple’s tongue-in-cheek efforts to make a friend’s sputtering MGB sports car take to the skies. It’s a collection of three channels of video set in the rolling prairies of Parkland, Alberta, as well as a series of photographs and a small replica of the MGB (complete with wings and a tail). The duo opted for Parkland, jokes Calgary-born Siebens, because “the wide open prairies are a great place to practise your flying skills.”

Doyle, who hails from Youngstown, Ohio, grew up in the southwestern U.S. at a time when the North American automotive industry was booming. Yet on the 50th anniversary of Taylor’s Aerocar, our global economy is suffering, and we’re now forced to depend on our governments to pull us out of the lurch. Even the Harper government is spending, announcing a $4 billion aid package last month for the country’s struggling automotive industry.

In this deepening recession, our anxiety is palpable, which is why IcarusCar evokes such strong nostalgia for the roaring ’40s and ’50s — a time of optimism, innovation and perhaps a bit of childlike naiveté — when one aeronautical engineer dreamed that it might be possible to take to the skies from your own driveway. “It was really a period of time that was greatly romanticized in the United States and North America,” says Doyle. “This Popular Mechanics idea that you could just take to the air from your neighbourhood was kind of manifest in this invention.”

In this spirit, the two artists drove the MGB to Siebens’s grandparent’s farmstead in the prairies. Twenty minutes from their destination, the antiquated sports car broke down and the couple realized that they had been too eager to make this project work. In the end, the mock-documentary turned out to be a modern spin on the myth of Icarus, the character from Greek mythology who flew too close to the sun on wings made of wax. They melted and he fell to a watery death. Siebens and Doyle got so caught up in the project that they, like Icarus, didn’t heed warning signs of impending failure. The duo, however, suffered a less brutal fate, simply changing course to produce a slightly different documentary than the one they set out to create.

“We really needed to get things accomplished by a certain time, but the reality was that it was an old car that had been sitting for a very long time and hadn’t had a tune-up in ages,” says Doyle. “So what I think really got us excited was the realization that we were kind of experiencing and creating our own kind of myth, if you will. We were creating this film about getting this old car and making it fly, but the reality was that we had this old car, and it wouldn’t drive.”

The experience, adds Siebens, was reminiscent of the process of making art (as well as the current economic turbulence). You have these grand visions, but things can go wrong, and when they do, it’s a great lesson, but it’s also quite humbling.