Taylor Ashby Hawkins’ ENDO– at ASHES/ASHES in New York explores a fusion of human and machine, inviting us into a world where desire, technology, and identity intertwine in an endless, revolving cycle.
The project is an immersive exploration of the entanglement between the body and technological apparatus, creating a space where the boundaries between human experience, mechanics, and self-perception blur. Through monumental sculptures and haunting imagery, Hawkins propels us into a cyclical narrative, where the tension between control and surrender plays out endlessly—like being trapped in the infinite loop of a revolving door.
At the heart of ENDO– lies an inquiry into the deeper relationship between humans and the objects we have engineered. The exhibition’s sculptures, composed of disused car engines and tactile synthetic materials, present hybrid forms—half human, half machine—that evoke an unsettling yet strangely comforting intimacy. These figures, reclined in mechanized structures, expose the fragility of the human form, held precariously by the cold, precise architecture of metal and rubber. Hawkins invites us to imagine a world where these structures no longer function as separate entities but as extensions of ourselves, symbiotic and ever-evolving.
The works suggest a kind of twisted eroticism, an intimate dance between human and machine, where the artificial limbs and mechanical hearts that cradle these bodies feel almost loving. Yet, there is a clear ambivalence in this union. Are we becoming enslaved by our own creations, or are we liberated through them? The text that accompanies the exhibition speaks to this uncertainty, offering a disorienting reflection on desire and fear, transformation and stagnation. It asks us to consider: what happens when we become inseparable from the technologies that shape us?
Hawkins seems to propose that we are already in this future—one where the "revolving door" of human invention and desire spins perpetually, keeping us in a liminal state. The figures in ENDO– appear at peace with this, their stillness suggesting a resolution, or perhaps resignation, to the inevitability of this human-machine merger. They pose no resistance, offering their flesh to the machine as if to say: we are already one. The quiet triumph here is that this merging, far from being cold or dystopian, is rendered with a kind of divine amorality—neutral, non-judgmental, and perhaps even utopian.
In ENDO–, the line between salvation and damnation is indistinct, making the viewer question the very nature of progress. Have we found a new form of freedom through technology, or are we simply circling in a trap of our own making? Either way, as Hawkins suggests, there’s no need to leave.
