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14/11/2014

Daniel Arsham / Simon Vega

Locust Projects, Miami

Daniel Arsham
Welcome to the Future

Locust Projects is proud to present Welcome to the Future, a major site-specific installation by Daniel Arsham. For the installation, Arsham transforms the gallery into an excavation site, digging trench in the gallery’s floor that holds thousands of calcified artifacts—a muted cacophony of 20th century media devices. Mounds of boom boxes, electric guitars, SLR cameras, Blackberries, game controllers, VHS tapes, Walkmans, film projectors, and portable televisions, rendered in crystal, volcanic ash, and other minerals fill the pit, collapsing linear narratives of past, present, and future. The trench presents the recent past as archeology, a world of technological objects whose obsolescence was built into their design, preserved like petrified wood or the figures of Pompeii. Arsham presents these devices as a mass below our feet, in a grand gesture that rewrites narratives of production, history, and discovery.

Arsham is known for his sculptural and architectural works, which warp or destabilize recognizable structures and forms with playfulness and wit. As a child, the artist survived Hurricane Andrew huddled in a closet of his family’s Miami home. The wreckage he encountered in the storm’s aftermath had a profound impact on his perception of architectural spaces and contemporary objects, which melt and crumble in his installations, leaving the viewer with the impression that a millennium has passed in an instant.

ABOUT DANIEL ARSHAM
Daniel Arsham (born 1980, Cleveland, OH) employs elements of architecture, performance, and sculpture to manipulate and distort understandings of structures and space. Arsham became widely known at the age of 25 when he was asked to design his first of several sets for Merce Cunningham’s productions. He is also active as one half of the art and architecture collaborative Snarkitecture, along with Alex Mustonen, and frequently collaborates with choreographer Jonah Bokaer. After graduating from Cooper Union, Arsham returned to Miami and helped found the seminal artist-run spaces The House and Placemaker gallery. Arsham’s work has been exhibited at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Paris and Miami, Storefront for Art and Architecture and Sean Kelly Gallery in New York, OHWOW in Los Angeles, the 2nd Athens Biennial in Athens, Greece, and Miami Art Museum and Museum of Contemporary art in Miami.

Welcome to the Future is made possible with major support from: John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Espirito Santo Bank, Galerie Perrotin New York. Special thanks: Mario Cader-Frech & Robert Wennett, Charles Coleman, Collecteurs, Jacqueline Green, Evelyn & Bruce Greer, Diane & Werner Grob, Jennifer & Brian Heller, Krillion Ventures, Melissa Krinzman, Carlos Lago, Olga & Vicente Lago, Rochelle & Steven Lanster, Museo Vault, Alex Menendez, Susan & Dennis Richard, Bonnie Teller Swerdloff, Debbie Wechsler.

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Simón Vega
Sub-Tropical Social Sculptures

Locust Projects is pleased to present Sub-Tropical Social Sculptures, Salvadorian artist Simón Vega’s debut Miami exhibition. During a series of residencies in Miami in 2012 and 2014, Vega developed a series of social/sculptural experiments that, in his words, “reflect how people from very different geographical and social circumstances organically come together socially, in a way that is unique to Miami.” Vega’s project revolves around six simply constructed, human-scaled wooden structures designed to activate social interaction: Discussional Funk-tional Benches, Sun-Siege Tower, Smoothie Station and Buzz Grenade Mini-Bars. The sculptures are open-ended, transmutable and mobile. Vega organizes happenings around the sculptures, at which point the structures become a tropical and color-injected version of Joseph Beuys' "social sculpture" concept, both in the gallery and around the city, mixing the aesthetic and social experiences to create sculptural objects that are both functional and non functional: furniture, social platforms and aesthetic, contemplative objects. The happenings foreground aspects of the artmaking process that are seldom on view: friendship, collaboration, sharing, spontaneity, humor, and the spirit of the city.

Simón Vega creates drawings, ephemeral sculptures and installations inspired in the informal, self made architecture and vendor carts found in the streets and marginal zones of El Salvador and Central America. These works, assembled with wood, cardboard, plastic and found materials often parody famous Modernist and mythological buildings and cities, surveillance systems as well as high-tech robots and satellites developed by NASA and the Soviet Space Program during the Cold War, creating an ironic and humorous fusion between first and third world, while commenting on the effects of that conflict in today’s Central America.

ABOUT SIMON VEGA
Born in San Salvador, El Salvador in 1972, Simon Vega graduated in Fine Arts at the University of Veracruz in Mexico in 2000 and received a Master´s degree in Contemporary Arts from the Complutense University in Madrid in 2006.
He has exhibited his work extensively in Europe, the United States and Latin America, including the 55th Venice Biennial in Italy, the IX Havana Biennial, in Cuba, the Museo del Barrio's "The S-Files" show in New York in 2011, the Bronx River Art Center in 2008, as well as at the Hilger BROT Kunsthalle in Vienna, Austria (2010 & 2012). He currently lives in La Libertad, El Salvador.

Image: Daniel Arsham

Opening reception: Saturday, November 15, 2014, 7pm
Reception for the artists during Art Basel in Miami Beach: Thursday, December 4, 7-10pm

Locust Projects
3852 North Miami Avenue Miami, Florida 33127
Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 10am-5pm
Extended Gallery Hours for Art Basel Miami Beach: December 1-6, 9am-5pm

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