In November 2015, Paris was attacked. Not long after, Sean Vegezzi filled a vacant retail unit in Lower Manhattan with t-shirts, sweeping compound, statues, core samples, Cold War rations, wildlife, and other scavenged matter, leaving the assembled works in place after the exhibition closed. Snow Cab, published by Loose Joints in 2016, documents that installation. The book is a record of an artist’s immediate, searching response to a public catastrophe and of the inert postconsumer space that briefly housed it.
Vegezzi’s practice has long examined how private and public space shapes the individual, particularly within the American military-industrial complex. Here those concerns meet a more personal register: love and terror, merchandise and mourning, surveillance and vulnerability. The installation’s gestures intervene in and undermine their Manhattan surroundings. A cracked black plexiglass panel, designed to block light, balances with a pixelated sky photographed at an insurance company’s empty training headquarters. Red industrial sweeping compound, used to control dust, sits in household plant pots. These materials, which ordinarily manage nature at a basic level, are reconfigured until the urban interior resembles the aftermath of an unforeseen event.
A group of hung t-shirts carries the show’s most pointed charge, depicting vilified terrorists, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a Pray for Paris slogan, and handmade shirts referencing waterboarding. Vegezzi reframes these garments to expose how geopolitical terror becomes merchandise, while also acknowledging the human and vulnerable in our reactions to a managed world.
The book holds 47 colour plates across 88 pages, with two texts by the artist, one of which was distributed to exhibition visitors as a printed booklet. For collectors, Snow Cab matters less as a document of a single installation than as an early, unsettled example of Vegezzi’s method: image making, sculpture, writing, and spatial intervention brought together in a single sequence. It shows an artist working at speed, turning the residue of a commercial interior into sympathetic evidence of experience after an event.
