ECCE MACHINA
72 × 108 in.
Latex paint on (6) cradled panels
Autonomous systems promise a future free of human error, yet their authority rests on the illusion that they can flawlessly interpret the world. Ecce Machina stages the collapse of that illusion. The 6 × 9-foot painting monumentalizes a Waymo autonomous ride-share vehicle, burned following protests of federal immigrations enforcement in Los Angeles, 2025. Rendered in a distilled sixteen-color negative palette that shifts the scene from reportage toward iconography, the work proposes an engineered diagram of system failure rather than an individual narrative of protest.
Comprising six poplar panels, the image recalls the devotional scale of an altarpiece while refusing its theological coherence. What remains legible—the headlights, grille, and wheel—persists as the residue of a design language outliving its functional life, the last intact traces of a technological body yielding to rupture. The work behaves less like a picture than an object: a machine held at the moment its capacity to “see” is extinguished. In that suspended state, the burned vehicle becomes a compression point where engineered futures collide with material fragility.
Based on an image by Ringo Chiu / AFP via Getty Images
GW Today—The George Washington University, “Revolutionary Tales: A Trio of Emerging Artists” by Greg Varner, Cara Taylor, William Atkins, Sarah Hochstein
Painting meets politics and history
In Cunningham’s paintings, hot content is tempered by cool form. He begins with emotionally charged images and abstracts them by presenting them in pixelated, “paint by numbers” style. He is drawn to dramatic, often politically loaded subjects, such as the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in the Baltimore metro area or a Waymo autonomous vehicle set on fire in Los Angeles during protests against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but then works to drain them of his own emotional response.
I’m curating moments of history that I think mark really critical transformations or shifts,” Cunningham said. “But I don’t want to impose how people should think or what they should believe. I almost want to zoom out as far as I can. Or maybe zoom in as close as I can—I don’t know which one it really is. But I want to cut all the cords of the connotation on the piece and just get denotation.”
In wall text for his large-scale painting (made up of six 3x3 panels) of the burning Waymo, currently on view at the NEXT Festival exhibition, he briefly mentioned that it’s based on an image from the Los Angeles ICE protests but says little beyond that about the topic. He is reticent to inject his own opinions, though he follows the news and is politically informed—he is a double major in politics and fine arts. But he doesn’t want to dictate the feelings his paintings should produce in viewers…