With support from a prestigious grant from VIA Art Fund Locust Projects is presenting a newly commissioned project by Ecuadorian-born, Miami-based artist Edison Peñafiel.

Upon entering Locust Projects Main Gallery a large-scale, immersive video installation places the viewer inside an oceanic underworld where migration, historical violence, and mythological transformation converge. This ambitious new production comprises large-scale projections, 3D animation, and an original soundscape, placing audiences at the center of a carefully orchestrated environment where curved screens and projection-mapped visuals envelop viewers in a multisensory experience. Envision a darkened gallery with soaring-high ceilings where light ripples across curved walls, engulfing viewers in a perpetual underwater world. Subtle echoes of orchestral music guide one’s gaze across a beautifully macabre world of contrasting light and darkness toward figures drifting through shifting tides and heavenly cosmos. Across the 360-degree projection environment, 81 archetypal figures move through a 13-phase arc of descent, encounter, dissolution, and stellar passage. 

Rooted in Andean cosmovision, Gnosticism, and Hermeticism, the work constructs the sea not as a literal place but as a cosmological state: Uku Pacha, the ancestral underworld through which the human must pass before transformation becomes possible. Historical events move through this space non-literally: the transatlantic slave trade, the death flights of the Rio de la Plata, the flooding of Mapuche sacred lands, Mediterranean migration. The protagonist Arcturus is consumed, reconstituted, and emerges as a bear rising unconsciously toward open space. The final image offers no resolution: two bears floating, no alignment, no hierarchy, an abrupt cut.  

Major support for De Profundis Clamavi ad Astra (From the Depths, I Cried Out to the Stars) is provided by VIA Art Fund. Major technical and in-kind support provided by MAD Arts. Additional support is provided by Funding Arts Network. The exhibition is commissioned and organized by Locust Projects and curated by Executive Director Lorie Mertes. 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Edison Peñafiel (b. 1985, Guayaquil, Ecuador) is a Miami-based interdisciplinary artist whose practice centers on immersive, large-scale installations structured as interconnected cosmological systems of image, sound, and architectural space. His work examines migration, systems of power, and collective memory through environments that merge performance, moving image, and material construction. Alongside these installations, he develops textile and sculptural works that function as autonomous components within a broader spatial and conceptual framework. Unfolding across multiple formats, his projects integrate multi-channel video, sound, and performative processes.

He is the recipient of the VIA Art Fund Artistic Production Grant, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Creative Research Grant, the Knight Arts Challenge Award, the Premio ARCO Comunidad de Madrid, and the South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship. His work is held in public collections including CA2M (Madrid), The Ringling Museum of Art (Sarasota, FL), Oolite Arts (Miami, FL), and Elsewhere Museum (North Carolina).

He has participated in residencies at MASS MoCA, Anderson Ranch, McColl Center for Art + Innovation, and the Watermill Center. Peñafiel is represented by Sabrina Amrani, Madrid, and Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami.

ABOUT VIA ART FUND:

VIA Art Fund is a 501(c)(3) founded by an international coalition of individuals and private foundations who believe in the central role art plays in society Funding artists, curators, and arts organizations around the world, VIA Art Fund awards grants in two categories– Artistic Production Grants, and an annual Curatorial Fellowship grant–that exemplify VIA’s core values of Artistic Production, Thought Leadership, and Public Engagement.

Artistic Production Grants are awarded twice annually to individual artists, nonprofit organizations, and institutions to support new commissions that take place outside museum or gallery walls, within the public realm, or in non-traditional exhibition environments. These grants are awarded to projects that best exemplify our three core values of Artistic Production, Thought Leadership, and Public Engagement. View VIA Art Fund’s 2025 grantees here.

ABOUT LOCUST PROJECTS

Founded by artists for artists in 1998, Locust Projects is Miami’s longest running nonprofit alternative art space. We produce, present, and nurture ambitious and experimental new art and the exchange of ideas through commissioned exhibitions and projects, artist residencies, summer art intensives for teens, and public programs on contemporary art and curatorial practice. As a leading incubator of new art and ideas, Locust Projects emphasizes boundary-pushing creative endeavors, risk-taking and experimentation by local, national, and international artists. We invest in South Florida’s arts community by providing artists with incubator grants and empower creative careers by supporting the administrative work of being an artist through an onsite artist resource hub.

Locust Projects receives Major Support from: The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; The Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners, The Children's Trust; the State of Florida through the Division of Arts and Culture and the National Endowment for the Arts; Dede and Robert Moss; Ruth Foundation for the Arts; Diane and Werner Grob; Susan and Richard Arregui; Wege Foundation; Funding Arts Network; Cowles Foundation, Kirk Foundation; and the INCUBATORS.

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