Locust Projects Kicks-off the Season with two Site Specific Installations

Mental Fight- An Anti-Spell for the Twenty-First Century, Michael Tedja's first one-person show in the United States, is as close as Locust Projects has come in a long time to hosting a painting show. Of course, for Tedja, painting is like an intestine, a container for indefatigable production, libidinal overdrives, endless research, and a stream of ideas that never ebbs. It's not a question of producing paintings for their own sake, of making luxury goods that sit on the wall, as much as it is of momentarily arresting the mad-cap flow of production, of pausing for a moment to asses what is going on before the current resumes its thundering course. And this often means that the canvases are in the middle of the room, or that the paintings have objects dangling from them. If sampling is the guiding logic of production for Tedja, don't think of it in terms of what a DJ does. This isn't mere citation, dropping a hook in so that things come off sounding better. This is an omnivorous sampling, a drive to swallow everything, to cannibalize whatever is within reach, the dirtier the better, and to produce paintings that are like frozen moments of digestion. And this cannibal sampling doesnÌt allow the paintings to respect any borders or media. Everything has to be included: photographs, text, drawings, dirt, shoes, bikes. Painting serves merely as an old frame of reference, as something that allows us to catch our footing in the runaway stream of materials and ideas.

Michael Tedja lives in Amsterdam, where he attended school at the Gerrit Ritvld Acadmie and the Sandberg Institut, with a short stint in the early 90s at The Art Institute of Chicago. He has exhibited his work at the Stedelijk Museum, Centraal Museum in Utretch, RotterdamÌs Kunsthal, and Galerie Krizinger in Vienna. He also published a novel, A.U.T.O.B.I.O.G.R.A.P.H.I.E. (Vassallucci Publishers, Amsterdam), in 2003.

In the project room, Miami-based Nicolas D. Lobo will produce Miramar substation/EMF displacement, a model of the electromagnetic field generated by the power substation adjacent to Locust Projects. Following recent projects that have sought to give physical form to ÏimmaterialÓ things like the disastrous flight pattern of ValuJet 592, Miramar Substation continues to trade in the spectral underside of the real. Giving a computer model physical dimension and using the exhibition space as its starting point, the model will be built on site as skillfully as possible and using humble materials usually associate with the world of garage engineers and grandpa technology. A graduate of Cooper Union, Lobo has exhibited at North Miami MoCA and Placemaker Gallery among other places.