Naa Songs
In Exhausted Machines, the new solo exhibition by multidisciplinary artist Mikey Singh Todd, the automobile is no longer just a vehicle. It becomes a memory chamber, a confession box, a haunted relic of movement and silence. Todd doesn’t paint cars—he paints what they leave behind.
Across twelve large-format oil paintings and a series of graphite and mixed-media studies, Exhausted Machines reframes the car not as a feat of engineering, but as a witness. A place where lives unfolded quietly: breakups whispered in the front seat, arguments echoing in the rearview, laughter swallowed by the engine noise on long drives home.
“Cars hold onto things,” says Mikey Singh Todd. “They absorb our moods. They store our routines. They hear the things we’re not brave enough to say in a room with someone. I’m not interested in horsepower—I’m interested in emotional residue.”
Rather than illustrating specific makes or models, the works in Exhausted Machines present abstractions: steering wheels suspended in space, dashboards bleeding into shadows, seatbelt textures rendered with coarse, almost scar-like brushstrokes. In No Airbag, a distorted view of a collision is frozen mid-moment—ambiguous, still, intimate. In Rearview, a fogged mirror suggests the blurred memory of somewhere you can’t quite go back to.
The aesthetic is raw and unsentimental—thick with oxidation tones, graphite greys, and smeared reds that suggest heat, pressure, and silence. This is not nostalgia. This is confrontation. This is the archaeology of feeling, done in oil and silence.
At the heart of the exhibition lies Voice Notes, a sound installation using salvaged car interiors. From rusted door panels and torn upholstery, audio snippets emerge: GPS recalculations, voicemails, arguments, apologies. Visitors sit among these fragments, invited to remember not the car—but what happened inside it.
“Every car I’ve ever been in has heard a version of me that no one else has,” Todd reflects. “There’s an intimacy to that. There’s grief in that.”
To accompany the show, Mikey Todd will host Open Garage, a public storytelling series where mechanics, cab drivers, poets, and strangers gather to share personal stories centered around cars—not specs or brands, but heartbreaks, escapes, late-night drives, and turning points.
