Exhibitions: GeoVanna Gonzalez
Note: GeoVanna Gonzalez’ exhibition at Locust Projects, scheduled to open April 3, has been postponed due to COVID-19. Stay tuned for updates on when the project will be rescheduled.
Behind-the-Scenes: GeoVanna Gonzalez: HOW TO: Oh, look at me
“It’s challenging,” Gonzalez says, “transforming from language to space, words to installation. But it’s revealing. They overlap – they’re different but the same. Poems build spaces that we enter, explore, that change us. I want my functional sculptures to do the same.”
GeoVanna Gonzalez has been working for over a year on her site-specific installation at Locust Projects, HOW TO: Oh, look at me. It continues the artist’s HOW TO series, in which Gonzalez creates works of art to physically translate poems featured in the online open-source poetry collection tutorials by Martin Jackson at www.tutorials.fyi.
“I’m interested in producing environments and alternative worlds into which I invite people to enter and walk through. I try to create these landscapes as I think of them. To offer people the opportunity to reflect on how their bodies exist in the time and space they are living in.” -- GeoVanna Gonzalez
Photo: Vaco Studio
The project Gonzalez has been working on for Locust Projects, that was originally scheduled to open on April 3, 2020, deepens Gonzalez’s commitment to creating provocative, participatory social spaces within institutional settings. As acts of queer infiltration, class-aware interventionism, her work wants us to see and explore, to dance and read-out-loud the potential of our embodied cognition. The massive interactive sculptural work fabricated at Pulp Arts studios in Gainesville, FL, translates the words, commas, and syntax of No Rothko into metal, bolts, and corners.
HOW TO: Oh, look at me invites you to view Gonzalez’s work as open source installation, in which the work is constantly created and recreated through interaction. The viewer is an active participant in the installation, becoming part of the artwork as they view, listen, and physically interact with other viewers and the installation itself. We look forward to seeing the final project installed at Locust Projects as soon as we are able given COVID-19. Stay tuned!
Commissioned by Locust Projects, supported by Oolite Arts, Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator, and Pulp Arts.
ABOUT MARTIN JACKSON: tutorials
Written and shared in cloud-based Google Docs, readers are invited to comment and edit the poems, creating a constantly-evolving, shifting collection of poetry that is never static or complete.
“Finding the ILS call for proposals for their Collection grants (via the lovely @crispinbest) was like opening the door to a glove seller. ‘Hello,’ the glove seller says, ‘I’m here to offer you the chance to own these, the perfect gloves, made just for you. The material, spawned from your own DNA, could not be more haptically satisfying. Their to-the-nanometre measured size as snug a fit as a Borges map’...I will use my gloves wisely”. --Martin Jackson
Learn more about Tutorials: https://litshowcase.org/content/tutorials-launch/
Create and use your own “gloves”: www.tutorials.fyi
GeoVanna Gonzalez is a Miami/Berlin-based LatinX artist. Interested in producing alternative environments, her work explores the connections between private and public spaces through interventionist and participatory art, new forms of collaboration and deliberate collectivity. Recent works have focused on making public art more inclusive and queer, as a way of opening up different and deeper ways of seeing-through and being-in our environments. When we open every window (2019), a solo show at Gr_und in Berlin, Germany, was a participatory social sculpture, a real life rendering of a house from Gonzalez’s childhood in Inglewood, LA. Play, Lay, Aye (2019) at the Bass Museum, Miami, was a modular structure activated by dancers, poetry readings, day-to-day visitors. She is founder and curator of Supplement Projects, an alternative art space & community meeting point based in a communal home and a studio in Miami; co-founder of performative reading club Read What You Want!; and member of queer/feminist arts collective COVEN Berlin.
LEARN MORE …
WATCH: Get to know more about GeoVanna Gonzalez’ practice through Oolite Arts’ SIDE X SIDE
LISTEN: This Sunday Painter podcast features GeoVanna Gonzalez and Michelle Lisa Polissaint discussing their practice and process.
Sunday Painter is hosted by past Locust Projects’ WaveMaker grantee, Alex Nuñez.
ABOUT GEOVANNA GONZALEZ’ SUPPLEMENT PROJECTS, a communal home and a studio, alternative art space & community meeting point
“My hope is that it will feel like a more welcoming place, to actually be a place of access, a place where people can come and learn, exchange… and also a place where artists feel like they can experiment with their practice,” -- GeoVanna Gonzalez on her 2018 Ellies-award-winning project Supplement Projects
Locust Projects 2020-2021 exhibitions and programming are made possible with 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; Berkowitz Contemporary Foundation; The National Endowment for the Arts Art Works Grant; Hillsdale Fund; the Albert and Jane Nahmad Family Foundation; VIA Art Fund | Wagner Incubator Grant; Funding Arts Network; The Jorge M. Pérez Family Foundation at The Miami Foundation; Susan and Richard Arregui; Kirk Foundation; Miami Salon Group; Scott Hodes; Jones Day; Community Recovery Fund at The Miami Foundation and the Wege Foundation; and the donors to the Still Making Art Happen Campaign and Locust Projects Exhibitionist members.