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“Is the earth evolving a new religion?”
That’s the question at the heart of 011668’s Virtua Gallery exhibition, The First International Church of Toyota—a multisensory experience featuring both a video and a “future relic”: a comically oversized Toyota emblem carved in stone, imagined as an artifact destined for storage in the backrooms of Natural History Museums yet to come.
011668, the artist behind The First International Church of Toyota, uses interdisciplinary work to explore themes of spirituality, mythology and cosmogony in the digital age. By positioning Toyota as a cornerstone of American spirituality, they confront contemporary industrial forces and frame them in a modern pantheon. While the video portion of the exhibit runs less than 10 minutes, 011668 manages to reimagine a modern creation myth—conceptualizing society’s dependence on finite resources through the visual languages of Japanese mecha drama and film noir.
Matt Henderson, Virtua’s founder and one of its resident artists, originally invited 011668 to participate in a pop-up event. But once Henderson engaged with their work, he was captivated. “I knew I’d bring them from Los Angeles to Portland as soon as I could,” says Henderson. When the opportunity arose, he quickly transformed Virtua Gallery’s hidden backroom event space (like most of Lloyd Center’s repurposed storefronts, Virtua has a storeroom tucked behind its retail floorplan) into an immersive environment where 011668’s work could fully resonate.
The First International Church of Toyota toys with the concept of a post-humanist society in which machines—Toyotas, specifically—outlive humanity by thousands of years. As narrated in the video, each vehicle survives for “2,000 years.” Viewers witness, from the perspective of this surviving species, the story of life on Earth told through Toyota’s lens, beginning with primordial soup and ending with the company’s post–World War I founding.
Highlights include video segments that compare the Toyota emblem to the Holy Trinity, a methodical breakdown of how dinosaurs sacrificed themselves to fuel our collective subconscious, a direct plea for disrupting the commercial space, and a poetic reflection on humanity’s final days of earthly habitation. The work blends academic theory with a surreal hyperreality, gazing backward through time; the result is a satirically grim prediction of an all-too-realistic future—but one well worth experiencing.
SEE IT: The First International Church of Toyota by 011668 at Virtua Gallery, 1027 Lloyd Center, 2nd Floor, West Side, instagram.com/virtua_gal. Noon–7 pm Saturday, 11 am–6 pm Sunday and by appointment through Sept. 30. $10–$15 suggested donation, no one turned away for lack of funds.
