Meredyth Sparks / Project Room: Anya Kielar
Opening reception: Saturday, May 12, 7-10pm
Locust Projects
3852 North Miami Avenue
Miami Fl 33127
Conversation with the artists: Saturday, May 12, 6pm
On view: May 12 – June 23, 2012
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, noon-5pm
Meredyth Sparks: So I Will Let It Alone And Talk About The House.
Locust Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition by New York-based artist Meredyth Sparks, featuring the artist’s first video animation and large-scale installation to-date. Sparks’ process is grounded in a concept she calls extraction, which highlights the gesture of cutting and removing material from an image or an object, emphasizing the spatial relationships that unfold. Through this process the artist reconsiders the contemporary political and aesthetic relevance of images originating in musical subcultures, the historical avant-garde, and the ever-evolving legacies of labor and gender.
In the entryway gallery Sparks will transform Eileen Gray’s Rivoli tea table into an architectural structure composed entirely of lengths of string. Large enough for a viewer to walk under, the installation alters perception of scale and sense of interior vs. exterior space. As the central motif of the exhibition, a labyrinthine mutli-paneled screen in the main gallery leads to various collage works and a projected video animation visible through the structure’s semi-permeable walls. Presenting another compression of physical space, the animation illustrates the multi-dimensional flight of humming birds and their unique ability to hover in the air in all directions, a motion akin to the circulation of images in contemporary culture.
About the artist
Meredyth Sparks was born in Panama City, Florida, in 1972. Sparks currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She earned her B.F.A. from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and her M.F.A. from Hunter College, NY. Sparks has exhibited widely in international galleries and museums, including solo gallery exhibitions at Veneklasen Werner, Berlin; Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels and Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris, among others. She has been included in group exhibitions at ICA, Boston; CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux; Les Recontres d’Arles Photographie, Arles; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela and The 2nd Moscow Biennial. In 2009, Monografik Editions published the artist’s first monograph, with texts by Nicolas Bourriaud and Robert Hobbs. Sparks is represented by Elizabeth Dee Gallery in New York.
Project Room: Anya Kielar: Lines
Locust Projects is pleased to announce Lines, new work by New York-based artist Anya Kielar in the Project Room. For the exhibition, Kielar will create a vignette-like installation reminiscent of a theatrical stage set. Painted and dyed fabrics will be cut into various shapes, both figurative and abstract, and strung up on clotheslines among a selection of found objects.
The installation is partly inspired by Kielar’s sprayograms, a term the artist uses to describe her process of creating images by spraying pigment over objects, which leaves stencil-like outlines of objects surrounded by a haze of color. Kielar is known for uncanny sculptures and installations that draw upon sources including set design, surrealist collage, post-minimalist sculpture, and the decorative arts. Noted for reinvigorating surrealism in her work, Kielar uses a symbolic language to tap into the human subconscious in a manner inspired by seminal surrealist artist Man Ray in the 1920’s.
In addition to the site-specific installation in the Project Room, Kielar’s sprayogram, Yellow Lines, a will be featured on over 30 bus shelters around Miami Beach and the Design District in May 2012 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 space in Miami.
Anya Kielar was born in New York, NY in 1978 and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA from Columbia University, and has exhibited solo projects at Rachel Uffner Gallery, NY, Daniel Reich Gallery, NY and Casey Kaplan, NY. Kielar has participated in group shows at 176 – Zabludowicz Collection, London; Guild & Greyshkul, White Columns, and Museum 52 in NY.
