Looking Back: Nancy Davidson and Pepe Mar
As we celebrate Pride Month, we take a look back at two amazing exhibitions at Locust Projects that explored gendered spaces, sexuality, and identity presented in November 2017.
Video filmed for Miami Design District by World Red Eye.
In our Main Gallery, New York-based interdisciplinary artist Nancy Davidson presented the multimedia installation p e r Sway. Referencing symbols of power and control, theater and performance, history and biophysics, p e r Sway found Davidson holding a distorted mirror to our bizarre and horrifying political climate, a world turned upside down and gone topsy-turvy (note, this was back in 2017!). Known for her anthropomorphic weather balloon sculptures in her four-decades-long sculptural practice, in which she deeply explores the architecture of the body, reducing the feminine body to its most elemental features and manipulating them into minimal objects imbued with acidic humor and absurd hypersexuality. She considers her forms to be characters that often allude to portrayals of people in literature, mass media and culture at large, reflected back through a feminist lens. Her installation at Locust Projects enabled the artist to experiment for the first time with the manipulation of the architecture of space, lighting, and video projections. To activate the space she created she invited dancers from the House of Ninja: Yummy Ninja (Deandre Brown), seen in the video above, and Slim Ninja (Jason A. Rodriguez), seen here, to perform and respond to the “promenade” her works conjure. Slim Ninja you might recognize as Lemar Wintour from the must-watch TV show POSE, which just released season two on NETFLIX this month.
Also on view in our Project Room was Man of the Night, an immersive solo installation by Miami-based artist Pepe Mar. The installation excavated the entirety of his practice; the artist collaged and assembled images of artifacts, gay ephemera and his personal archive to create a self-portrait that mines his identity and further explores his interest in queer spaces. For this exhibition, Mar collected images from all of his collage and assemblage works from the past 15 years. The artist sees the room as an artwork in and of itself that also houses other artworks, a self-contained art and architectural intervention that collides the artist’s past and present, a Gesamtkunstwerk. The imagery in Mar’s work includes a self- referential cast of anthropomorphic characters. A recurring motif is “el penacho,” or what the artist describes as a mass of elements coalescing together and becoming a burst of energy. His works are snapshots of his restless mind, an archive of his persona.
Learn more about p e r Sway
Inspired by Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the grotesque body, Nancy Davidson created a carnival filled with a horrifying yet alluring ensemble of sculptures, a space where envy, jealousy and the sinister roam free to create a sense of anxiety and uncertainty. The artist viewed the exhibition in its totality to be a ritual space that explored parodies of power and a feminized transformation of the space.
“We’re all in the same place, with our bodies, trying to ask this question: where are we? what are we doing? what does it mean?” - Nancy Davidson
Visitors entered the exhibition through Marquee, a portico with a double-sided passageway that was intended to act as a site of transition and choice in her liminal space. Once they chose to enter the space, they were confronted with Bigarurre, the centerpiece of the exhibition. Davidson considered the 14-foot-tall inflatable to be the “embodiment of topsy-turvy, the upside down of the carnival festival and the ritual world of status reversal,” a bulbous mass that alludes to the cancerous, toxic culture that is metastasizing in America today (remember again, this was 2017..). Situated in the space were Palanquin/Platforms, four sculptures that recall the litter chairs used as an elite form of transportation throughout history from ancient Egypt and China through to Victorian-era England. These sculptures parody this form of transit, which were commonly used in cultures where women were forced into seclusion. The forms were embodied by four characters: Eyeenvy, Green-eyed Lady, Sinistrous or way after Laocoon, and Mini Sin, which reduce vainglorious evils to comic figures.
Nancy Davidson’s exhibition at Locust Projects was made possible in part by a Funding Arts Network grant.
Learn more about Man of the Night
Of particular significance to Pepe Mar are his experiences in two gay cultural meccas: Miami and San Francisco. Mar went to art school in San Francisco when the city’s significant LGBT scene was near its epoch. After finishing art school, he moved to Miami, another gay epicenter where he would eventually firmly establish his artistic practice. As with many members of the LGBT community, the gay nightlife scene became a place of refuge and liberation for the artist. However, as these Miami establishments shuttered due to gentrification, the artist chose to explore the idea of queer spaces in his work in greater and greater depth over the years.
"Everyone carries a room about inside him." - Franz Kafka
In Man of the Night, the artist turned the lens inward to reflect on his own identity through a room-filled installation that functioned as a queering of the project gallery, a self-portrait at a critical juncture in his career, and a nostalgic look at the entirety of his art practice. At Locust Projects, the artist featured two major new assemblages. The first, Curiosity is a portrait of one of his anthropomorphic characters using everything from silk tassels from Morocco to a Comme des Garçons t-shirt to pottery, and a bronze lobster. The work is named after the Curiosity Rover, which was designed by NASA to examine and collect data on Mars; the artist says his practice in ways reflects the same mission of the rover, exploring new terrain and collecting items from his personal life. The second major work, Mars Sunset resembles an acid orange sky with shelves filled with the artist’s own masks mixed with Indonesian marionettes, vessels and foliage to create a scene that the artist says is a “transmutation of color and form becoming landscape,” with a luminosity created by large Lucite balls.
Additional support for Pepe Mar: Man of the Night was provided by Carmen Corrales, Leslie & Greg Ferrero, Steve & Arlyne Wayner, Adriana & Ricardo Malfitano, and David Castillo Gallery.
Latest Happenings with Nancy Davidson and Pepe Mar
Nancy Davidson’s current exhibition at Krannert Art Museum, Hive, is currently on view as a work of public art from the exterior of the building, while the indoor gallery is temporarily closed to the public.
On June 5, Pepe Mar joined Miami Design District’s cultural happenings with an exhibition of dynamic assemblage work made in studio, you can visit the artist “in studio” at NE 40th Street suite 104.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Nancy Davidson (b. 1943, Chicago, IL) lives and works in New York. Davidson is an interdisciplinary artist, working primarily in sculpture and installation. She received a BFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1975. Her work has been exhibited at major institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), the Art Institute (Chicago), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, (Ridgefield, CT), Corcoran Museum of Art (Washington, DC), Artists Space (New York), Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, NY), among many others. Davidson’s honors include the Guggenheim Fellowship (2014), Pollock Krasner Foundation (2001, 2015), Creative Capital (2005), Anonymous Was a Woman Award (1997), Yaddo Residency (1980,2003), Massachusetts Council of Arts, Individual Artists Fellowship (1981), NEA (1979). Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, the Village Voice, the Brooklyn Rail, Der Spiegel and Art/Text.
Pepe Mar is a cognoscente of materiality at the forefront of social fluency and personal obsession. Mar excavates the ritual narratives inherent in secondhand stores, science fiction, celebrity, commercial design, and social media to create abstract and anthropomorphic barometers of contemporary culture. His rich, experiential process recalls the history of assemblage and painting. Mar heeds the call of Roland Barthes’ universal signifiers and answers with icons both appropriated and original. The artist’s work is committed to a personal and universal exploration of cultural alienation.
Pepe Mar was born in Mexico and lives and works in Miami, Florida. He received his BFA from California College of the Arts (CCA), San Francisco. Mar attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine (2011) and his MFA from Florida International University in 2012. In 2013, the artist participated in the Bronx Museum International Residency Program. In 2014, Mar had his first institutional commission in the US at DiverseWorks, Houston. In 2015, the artist participated in the Banff Residency in Canada and was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Wavemaker grant for his project Versus. In 2016, the artist participated in the ISCP Residency in New York and was the recipient of both a Pollock-Krasner grant and a South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship. In the same year, he was part of the exhibition Woven at Deutsche Bank, New York and Philodendron at the Wolfsonian Museum, Miami Beach. His most recent solo exhibition in 2017 was Excess of Sleep Produces Monsters at David Castillo Gallery, Miami Beach and Man of the Night at Locust Projects, Miami. Mar has an upcoming solo exhibition at The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh in 2019. His work has been exhibited throughout the US and venues abroad and is included in major collections in the US, Europe, and Latin America including public collections such as the ICA Miami and Perez Art Museum. His work has appeared in the New York Times, ARTnews, Art in America, Art + Auction, the ArtNewspaper, and Artnet. Pepe Mar is represented by David Castillo Gallery.
Locust Projects 2017-2018 exhibitions and programs are made possible with support from: The Alvah H. and Wyline P. Chapman Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; Cowles Charitable Trust; The State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture; The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation; the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners; The National Endowment for the Arts Art Works Grant; Locust Projects Exhibitionist and Significant Others Members.