T0RQU3 is the first public exhibition of works by TRUCK Arts Collective, the suped-up platform used by artists Drew Pardy, Emily Neufeld, and Anine Canto to explore perceptions of labour and work culture as it pertains to gender, political divides, and assumptions around class made in rural Canada. The collective subverts the use of 4x4 trucks in order to look at these ideas. More often people use trucks as aesthetic objects – signifiers that speak to the identity of the driver, rather than a tool for hauling. In T0RQU3, trucks function as carriers of dysfunctional material, closets for playing dress-up, or rooms for reflecting on who we are, whether we accept or reject our rural roots. 

During a residency at The Empire of Dirt in Creston, BC, the collective created costumes and characters of blue-collar labourers who do hard work, but with abundant style and flair, spending considerably more time sewing, bedazzling, and screenprinting dirt prints than getting any strenuous jobs done. They were as concerned with lace handkerchiefs to mop their brows as they were with hanging oversized pry bars on garter belt-inspired tool pockets. Their characters spent as much time looking tough as they did actually digging, hauling logs, or moving rocks. These performances are documented with advertisement-sized banner portraits and video documentation of the collective, in character, on work sites. This mode of representation couples the works themselves with the forms and tropes of advertising and social media, where so many mainstream ideas of traditional masculinity and femininity show up.

A second residency at Union House Arts in Port Union, NL was more focused on using the
truck as an artmaking tool. There the collective embossed paper with truck tires and used an antique letterpress to create vanity license plates. They even taped some of the plates to the side of a truck and drove it through mud puddles, subverting the expectations of printmaking as an art form. Phrases like “WRK HRD” or “2TUF4U” are barely discernible through thick splatters of mud that coat embossed license plate shapes on paper. They used the truck as an embossing tool itself, collaborating with local truck owners at job sites and parking lots to emboss tire treads on large paper that we then treated with more mud splattering. Beyond printmaking, the collective built a stand-alone tailgate bench that they toted around rural Newfoundland to use in large scale photography and work performances. With stunning Atlantic backgrounds, the tailgate is presented in photos as a carpentry work table, a lunch spot littered with custom food wrappers, or a road-blocking break site for roadside construction.

Made up of three artists who were born and raised in rural communities, TRUCK provides a framing to process the hardy confidence, down-to-earth rowdyness, and unyielding resourcefulness that they adopted from the same communities they felt excluded enough by to abandon. While all three artists now live in bigger cities and have found a greater sense of belonging as a mixed bunch of queer and/or racialized people, they are curious as to why they still feel a sense of pride at being able to parallel park a 4x4 truck or operate a skid steer. Rural hometowns become almost mythological after they are abandoned in order to find stronger connections to diversity in new communities and a stereotypical view of rural townspeople and their politics sneaks in to replace a much more nuanced experience of living in these communities. The work of TRUCK collective reflects on the real fear of the other that permeates these places while confronting biased expectations or the rural/urban divide, exploring the connections between small-town and big-city selves. In their explorations, presentations of usefulness become a skill learned to fit into unwelcoming places, examining the values and identity traits we attach to work ethic and how the performance of resourcefulness can create a sense of belonging.