Jesse Draxler, screenshots from the long-format video of the drive that will be featured at the event.

November 24, 2025

Machine of Loving Grace: The Intimate Aesthetics of Draxler’s Journey

On the occasion of Art Basel Miami, Jesse Draxler presents C280: MACHINE OF LOVING GRACE, a multimedia installation created in collaboration with The Patina Collective, the world’s largest museum dedicated to Mercedes-Benz.

At the heart of the project lies a cross-country road trip across the United States, documented by Draxler while driving his 1997 Mercedes C280. The experience unfolds through LED walls, video projections, photographic prints, rare vehicles, and an exclusive capsule of merchandise. At Fakewhale, we took the opportunity to delve deeper with Draxler into the genesis of this new work, its visual and conceptual roots, and the ever-evolving intersection between art, mechanical memory, and experimentation.

Fakewhale: Your artistic practice was born in a family of mechanics and carpenters, in rural Wisconsin. How present is that world in your aesthetic today, and particularly in the project C280: MACHINE OF LOVING GRACE?

Jesse Draxler: Growing up my dad was always working on some sort of vehicle, fixing, rebuilding, painting. He loves muscle cars and would drive me around in an old classic firebird. He built a go-cart out of welded steel and lawn mower machine parts when I was a kid that I ripped around on until I ran it into too many walls for it to keep going. While I never got into the mechanical side of it, the aesthetics and appreciation have always been a part of my DNA, regardless of how consciously I have been aware of its strong influence in everything I do. It feels like this project is a culmination of these collected influences that I have become more and more aware of as my career progresses. It seems appropriate that I put a perfect bit of machinery, like my c280, up on a pedestal as the object of artistic worship.

The very title of the project, Machine of Loving Grace, evokes a contrast between mechanics and tenderness, structure and emotion. What is the origin of this title, and how does it connect to the psychological dimension that often runs through your work?

The title originates from multiple points. The first connection is the 90’s band Machines of Loving Grace who I was listening to a lot around the time of the drive and after, particularly on CDs which I purchased along the route. I dig everything about the band from their sound to the aesthetics, which I integrated into some of my own logos and symbology.
The band itself is named after a poem from 1967 by Richard Brautigan “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” which describes a utopia facilitated by loving technology.
Also, while driving I was listening to some podcasts and in one a book called “More Everything Forever” was mentioned and sounded interesting so I picked it up. Chapter 2 is called “Machines of Loving Grace.” At that point I was already playing with using the phrase as my show title, but that random bit of synchronicity solidified it.
The title was perfect for the way it reframed the idea of what this project was, and what it meant to me. Thinking in sync with the machine, wondering what dreams it had the night before, what it’s motivations were. I felt transported somewhere outside of what was otherwise a very stressful time in my life through the routine of strapping in and exchanging energy with this vehicle.

The project takes shape from a road trip across the country, documented on video. What role did the journey itself, the road, the landscapes, the pauses, play in shaping the narrative and visual construction of the final piece?

I wasn’t setting out to make a travelog of my trip, but capture the feeling of being out there, and the feeling of being connected to a machine so intimately for such a duration of time. The hallucinatory state the road can induce. The places the mind wanders over long stretches of uninterrupted tedium.

In this installation you collaborate with The Patina Collective, a museum devoted to celebrating Mercedes Benz automobiles as an object of worship and memory. How did this collaboration develop, and how do the rare cars featured in the exhibition interact with your visual materials?

I’ve known Daniel from the Patina Collective for some years now from another much smaller activation we did some time ago, before The Patina Collective began. We’ve kept in touch, and once I got my c280 we had been talking that we should do something together between myself and the museum.
The cars featured within the installation are all rare 1/1 vehicles from the museum’s collection, very chic, which stand in contrast to the raw aluminum look of my 1997 c280 that my drive took place in, creating a dialog of reverence from such elite vehicles to one of their ancestors.

Beyond the video and installation components, you also created a series of photographic prints and a capsule of merchandise. How did you approach integrating such different media within a single project?
Creating immersive worlds through various media is something I have always done, so when concepting the experience of this activation it wasn’t just the video I was thinking about. I was thinking about the merch capsule to compliment it, the prints people could purchase to bring part of the experience home with them, etc. Thinking in that 360 degree way from the start ensures all elements remain cohesive and nothing comes across as an afterthought. To me, the merch capsule holds equal importance to the video itself, each element adds to the immersive quality of the activation.

Which of your past experiences felt most aligned with, or helpful in building, this project?
Honestly none – this is something new for me.

In your musical projects you work exclusively with field recordings and treat composition as an act of montage and vision. Did you apply a similar logic to the video editing process here? How does sound interact with the imagery of the journey?

The actual process is nothing the same as far as technicality, but as far as creative-wise exactly the same. I don’t know exactly what I am doing going into it, I have the assets I have chosen or created and I work instinctively until I start to see a pattern emerge and then begin to go down that path until I reach something that resonates. And repeat. This process goes for all aspects of my practice from curation of collaborators to hands on.

Looking ahead, C280 is a deeply personal project, but it also opens up to a collective imagination tied to memory, technology, and movement. Do you intend to expand this exploration into new directions or future contexts?

Earlier this year I released the project C2ASH, a generative collage project on Verse, and the follow up to its predecessor CRASH of the same kin. This is to say that not only will these concepts evolve but have been for quite some time. As much as I love cars, I try to avoid the common trap many artists fall into when working with cars as a source material. I only want to work with vehicles as source material if I have something unique to say, or a perspective to view them that hasn’t been overexposed already through trend-level banality or nihilistic objectivity as much of art world “car works” are. 🙂