Locust Projects: 105 NW 23rd St

Miami’s brutal summer heat has obviously done irreparable damage to the folks at Locust Projects—again. As evidence, take the deeply sober, super serious, way-out-of-left-field show that they are going to inaugurate their new exhibition season with. Since when have concepts like seriality and site-specificity and situational aesthetics ever been on the mind of these guys, who just last year, if memory serves, were all caught in pentagrams, burning black candles, suicide drives and teen angst. Maybe all that was just a sad attempt to hang on to the last vestiges of their quickly-fading youth.

This year, brain-fried and much too aware of the grey hairs that are starting to collect around their temples, they wanted to start out with serious adult themes, edging academic concerns, thinking sober thoughts. So, they’ve invited Eugenio Espinoza, one of Venezuela’s most important post-kineticism artists, to exhibit an Inpenetrable. The Inpenetrables are room-sized, site-specific, grid-based paintings that, as their title suggests, block any access to the room in which they are exhibited. After taking a thirty years hiatus in the production of these site-specific projects, Espinoza recently began to reinvestigate the premises that busied him early in his career—and Locust Projects has seized the opportunity to be at the beginning of these reconsiderations.

At Locust Projects, Espinoza has remapped the space and constructed an Inpenetrable that covers over half of the square footage of the exhibition space. Produced specifically for the space, this massive painting engages the viewer through a series of displacements. The painting is presented horizontally, the viewer is barred from the exhibition area, the geometry is made to feel mundane since it can be linked to tiled tabletops or a kitchen floors. Raw but precise, Espinoza proposals return conceptual concerns to geometrical abstraction. His works exemplifies that deeply-rooted vein of erudite Latin American art, free of silly figuration and political sloganeering, that is slowly beginning to surface in important exhibitions world-wide.

In the project room, New York-based Mike Dee will present Sometimes I Feel, an exhibition that includes a video and thirteen star sculptures that represent the letter M of Marijuana and the drug-infused decline of rock’s myths. The video Big Ending, a tight, jittery loop of the band U2 in concert, shows pop turning into noise, a commodity coming undone in the act of its negation.