Drive-In: Second Feature - 1982

Car size: 60 x 72 x 216 inches

Twigs, tree branches (willow, maple, spruce, pine),bamboo, twine and adhesive to bind knots, 16 mm film installation
Exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1982

A full scale 1958 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz made from twigs, branches and twine is positioned facing a Drive-In type movie screen created from branches and canvas. On the canvas is continuously projected a compilation film made from 1950's trailers for movies such as 'The Incredible Shrinking Man” together with ads for soda, pizza, hamburgers and popcorn.
Collection of the Guggenheim Museum, New York

Review(s) on Drive-In: Second Feature, 1982

Drive-In: Second Feature appears like a totemic sign of the industrial, mechanical age of the motion picture and the automobile, which is passing as new electronic technologies emerge, altering our way of life and our forms of entertainment and art-making. The future of film and television, as we know them, is open. Roger Welch’s elegant work contemplates film from a double perspective, seeing it as both a theatrical and an installation medium.
John G. Hanhardt, Whitney Museum of American Art, September 1982

Drive In: Second Feature, of 1982, appears at first to be the work of a lunatic or an obsessive folk artist. A full-size 1950’s Cadillac constructed in great detail of branches and twigs faces a screen hung on a framework of branches where previews for “B” movies are shown over and over again. The car has an extraordinary presence, but in this case bizarre and animate. It is one of the most beautiful and fully realized objects in contemporary art.
Donald Goddard, New York Art World, Online Review, 2001