Robert Fielding’s Oz-some art cars once lit up desert highways; now they’re being painted, illuminated and photographed in their final resting places.

One does not simply drive across the Australian Outback (even in a Subaru) without being prepared for the worst. Those who took the oft-inhospitable, mostly desert region that makes up most of the Australian continent lightly have left cautionary reminders, in the form of dozens of rusting abandoned vehicles, scattered across the parched red wastelands.

Many of these junked cars, trucks, and even the odd ute (yes, we said “ute”) or two can be found in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY for short): a 39,633.4 square mile Aboriginal local government area that occupies the remote north-west corner of South Australia state. A mere 2,276 people (as of 2016) reside in the APY lands; one of whom is artist, painter and photographer Robert Fielding (above).

Fielding is of mainly Aboriginal heritage and his home base is Mimili, a small community of under-300 situated in the rocky, drought-stricken Everard Ranges. It’s no surprise desperate travelers abandoned their vehicles in the scrubby desert just off the Stuart Highway (“The Track” through The Outback). No doubt their forlorn presence struck a chord in young Fielding, who was born in Lilla Creek just north of the APY lands.

“I’m salvaging what belonged to the elders of our communities throughout the APY Lands and from Indulkana and Mimili, and bringing these cars to life,” explains Fielding. The artist’s use of these abandoned relics of modern life as media for expressing traditional indigenous art offers a novel method of interpreting the Aboriginal experience through the prism of recent history. In other (and much less) words, it’s cool!

Fielding’s long-exposure night photographs are the result of a labor-intensive process involving the application of reflective paint and the strategic placement of natural light. “I’m lighting them up with tealight candles and giving it another feeling and another ghostly effect with what’s going on,” according to Fielding. “There’s a light within this vehicle that’s hidden in crevices throughout.” Unpredictable weather conditions and the chaotic flickering of the candles try Fielding’s patience and test his stamina as he waits to capture the perfect shot.

Fielding has no issues when it comes to redefining prehistoric art traditions for the modern age, and he’s eager to apply the latest digital technology to assist his photography. “The reason I like new media is the camera is a tool that indigenous people are very strong and proud to be in front and behind the lens,” he explains.

Fielding has stayed close to home and close to his subjects while working out of the Mimili Maku Arts center in the APY Lands. Recognition has come from afar, however, since he was awarded top prize in the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards twice in the past three years. He has also left the APY to host solo exhibitions of his work in Adelaide and Melbourne, while several of his photographs have been acquired by the National Gallery of Australia. It seems that even in The Outback, a short drive can take you a long way.

The Volkswagen Type 1 Beetle, one of the 20th century’s most iconic vehicles, also served as a rolling car canvas for artists just itching to bug society.

Over 21 million Type 1 Beetles were manufactured between 1938 through 2003, leaving an indelible mark on pop culture’s psyche. VW sought to monetize the classic Bug’s nostalgic appeal through the evocative New Beetle that debuted in 1997, and the subsequent A5 Beetle introduced in 2011.

Now that VW has declared the current generation of Beetles to be the last, we can fondly look back to those “true” Bugs immortalized as art cars and transformed into artworks.

The classic Bug made its last hurrah on July 30th of 2003, when the 21,529,464th and final original Type 1 VW Beetle rolled off the production line in Puebla, Mexico. The exquisite Beetle art car above, snapped by Flickr member Angélica Portales (A30_Tsitika) in December 2010, hails from Mexico City. Artists Francisco and Xena Bautista decorated the late-model Bug with tiny seed beads in the traditional Huichol style – a painstaking process that took around 7 months to complete.

Water Bug

Remember those old DDB magazine ads that featured a floating VW Bug? Well, those don’t apply to this replica Beetle since it’s made of concrete and weighs about 8 tons. You’ll find it – bring your wetsuit – among the many undersea artworks at the Underwater Museum, off the coast of Cancun, Mexico.

Artist Jason deCaires-Taylor designed the sunken Bug to be sea-life-friendly with pierced windows providing smaller fish with shelter and crustacean habitats accessible via slots under the faux doors. The roughened surfaces are designed to help new coral growths get a grip.

For Ladybirds Only

While GM’s late and lamented luxo-barges epitomized the American Dream back in the day, the lowly VW Bug was a dream-come-true for countless car-buyers on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. It’s fitting, therefore, that Texas hosts not only the Cadillac Ranch but also a “herd” of five VW Beetles given a ladybug-like makeover.

You’ll find this Buggalo-like herd of beetle-y Beetles at the Running N Art Ranch in Saint Jo, Texas, a town of about 1,000 souls in Montague County just south of the Oklahoma border. The quintet of decommissioned Bugs sport jointed legs made from old oil field pipes and are painted red with black polka-dots.

Unlike the once-stately Caddys sticking out of the ground near Amarillo, these art cars are off-limits to amateur artists. Flickr member Nicholas Henderson (TexasExplorer98) visited the ranch in March of 2017.

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Life is tenuous and luxury easily lost, as illustrated in brilliant glittering fashion by this perfect replica of a Mercedes Benz S550 that has seen better days. Can arbitrarily assigned status be maintained even once an object has been used, abused and discarded for newer and nicer things? Artist Jordan Griska ruminates on these questions and contradictions with ‘Wreck,’ a crushed vehicle reproduced in faceted mirrored stainless steel.

Though its appearance intimates violence and destruction, the car remains undeniably beautiful thanks to all of those individual panes reflecting light at a slightly different angle, making it look like an oversized gemstone. Philadelphia Contemporary, which premiered the sculpture last fall at the city’s Pier 9, notes that the sculpture touches on the ways in which debauchery and decadence can spin out of control.

“Wreck is based on a computer-generated model of a luxury sedan, in a video game, which was manipulated to look like it was involved in a crash that resulted in a fatality,” says Griska. “I crafted 12,000 individual pieces of mirror-finish stainless steel, over the course of almost two years, in order to transform that model into a full-sized three-dimensional monument.”

“The perfect geometry and flawless materiality of the piece reflect the inspiration of idealized digital design, in stark contrast with the grimness of the reality it represents. Beauty, technology and engineering collide with death and reality.”

If you’ve ever wondered what the cars of Mad Max: Fury Road would look like all cleaned up, or you want some inspiration for a totally bonkers hot rod creation of your own, check out this photo series by photographer John Platt. Minute details of the vehicles can be seen in shockingly pristine states, as they were just after their creation and prior to the start of filming, giving us a good look at all the custom contraptions welded together into junkyard monsters.

In the movie, there’s so much desert dust kicked up by the tires of all those vehicles, we miss out on a lot of those details. The cars are appropriately filthy – and in this universe, they probably always would have been.

It’s hard to imagine anyone putting time and effort into washing and shining them up in between epic chases on the sand, and all those parts came from scrap yards anyway.

That makes Platt’s photo series all the more satisfying. He got to photograph some of the movie’s 150 custom vehicles in his studio with proper lighting before they got dirty, and it’s a good thing, too – most of them were utterly destroyed during filming.

Production designer Colin Gibson individually designed and sculpted each car and motorcycle according to writer and director George Miller’s vision. No wonder it took 15 years to complete pre-production. See the whole series here.

Their body panels consist of a lacework of metal gears, their windshields no more than mesh, their seats steel and the spaces under their hoods hollow, but these life-sized car sculptures still manage to look like they could fly down the street at top speeds at any moment. A group of 50 artists raids the scrapyards of Pruszków, Poland for trash they can integrate into their Gallery of Steel Figures, a museum full of impressively lifelike recycled art.

The art collective previously wowed the internet with their sculptural recreations of pop culture figures, including Predator, the Na’avi from Avatar and Transformers. Their latest creation includes faithfully reproduced replicas of iconic cars, including a Bugatti Veyron, Lamborghini Aventador, Fiat 500, Maserati GranTurismo and a Mercedes-Benz 300 SL.

Built to scale with operable doors and interiors that match the originals down to the insignias and dash instruments, the models are made entirely from scrap metal welded into shape. The exposed engine of the Bugatti is a particularly impressive detail. Check out the whole gallery on their Facebook page.