Locust Projects presents Karl Haendel / Project Room by Carlos Rigau

From January 19 through March 2, 2013.

Carlos Rigau, By Design at Locust Projects, 2013
Now celebrating its 15th year of exhibiting experimental contemporary art, Locust Projects is presenting the exhibition High Performance Stiffened Structures by Los Angeles-based artist Karl Haendel. The installation features the artist’s archive of 35mm slides projected on the walls of Locust Project’s main space by a cacophonous array of automatically advancing slide projectors. Haendel, who is mostly known for installations of large-scale graphite drawings that explore contradiction, anxiety and power, has accumulated over 10,000 slides in his archive, each one representing a potential or completed drawing. While the slides themselves are organized into categories such as Local Churches, Ampersands, Babies Crying and Terrorism each projector in the installation only shows an edited selection that attempts to draw connections between different types of categories or imagery. The advance of the projectors is not syncopated, allowing for over a million combinations of image relationships to illuminate the space.

The list of slide categories is printed on Locust Projects’ façade, visible only from outside of the space. Haendel writes, “Reading the list sort of tells you what my concerns are, in a distanced, objective (and funny) manner. I think they also tell you something about navigating a messy world with too much information, and how one comes to make sense, and ultimately meaning, from it. The list transcends interests and likes and becomes about choices and values. How we as a culture make meaning is at the center of my work, and this slide archive shows how over the past decade I have tried to do so myself.”

Karl Haendel is an artist who makes drawings, installations, films, and public projects. He received a BA from Brown University in 1998 and a MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2003. He also studied at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Recent solo exhibitions include Yvon Lambert, Paris, France, The Box, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, and Lever House, New York, NY. His work has been included in recent group exhibitions at the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO; the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL; the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway; the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN; the Drawing Center, New York, NY; “Prospect II”, New Orleans, LA; the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; the New Museum, New York, NY; the Fundación/Colección Jumex, Mexico; and the Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY.

In the project room, Locust is showcasing new work by New York-based Miami native Carlos Rigau. Entitled By Design, Rigau’s video sculpture consists of a low Formica wall and platform resembling retail shop fittings, which supports images and objects resembling wood. Rigau is concerned with artifice, display and perception, incorporating plastic imitations of natural materials into his installations. A video projected onto the piece depicts a rolling gate in flames, opening to reveal a gritty Miami landscape.

Since founding the artist-run space General Practice in Miami in 2011, Rigau has been concerned with the viewer’s experience of video in the built environment. His curatorial project Fighting Kissing Dancing (de la Cruz Collection and Fabric Workshop and Museum) was a collection of artists’ videos shown in an environment designed by the artist to contextualize the viewing experience. By Design is Rigau’s first solo exhibition in Miami since he relocated to New York.

In conjunction with the Project Room exhibition, Rigau’s work will be featured on over 30 bus shelters around Miami in February 2013 for the Bus Shelter Project, part of Locust Projects’ public art initiative Out of the Box, which commissions artists to create new work for public spaces in Miami.

Carlos Rigau was born in 1978 and raised in Little Havana, Miami, Florida. He received his MFA from Hunter College in New York. His work has been exhibited at LMAKprojects and Jack Tilton Gallery in New York; Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago; and Nice and Fit in Berlin, Germany. In Miami he has exhibited at Miami Art Museum, MoCA North Miami, Dorsch Gallery, Dimensions Variable, Art and Cultural Center of Hollywood, and Art Center South Florida. His project room at the de la Cruz Collection in Miami, Fighting Kissing Dancing, was also exhibited at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. Rigau is the founder of General Practice, an artist-run space that organizes projects in Miami and New York.

Locust Projects
3852 North Miami Avenue
Miami, FL 33127
305.576.8570
www.locustprojects.org

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