Irene Sperber

It is Christy Gast and Felice Grodin’s turn to hold court at the highly successful, not for profit Locust Projects exhibition space until April 12.

LP allows creative space in every sense of the word. Originated and fostered by three Miami artists in 1998, Locust Projects vision was birthed and brought to full life with artists sensibilities and progression in mind; a concept that flourishes to this day encouraging experimentation with a vital and fundamental approach to actual working methodology.

A committee reviews project proposals for “site-specific and experimental” exhibitions. Gast’s proposal caught the eye of the committee and she was asked to participate; every artists dream.

Executive Director Chana Budgazad Sheldon explained the process: “Christy has been working on this project for over a year, and truly used the opportunity at Locust Projects to realize a large scale sculptural installation that is unlike anything we have exhibited in this space. Two, life-sized nuclear missiles are suspended from our 15-foot high ceilings. Additionally, the artist created her most ambitious single-channel video to date, which is projected on a large screen that has architecturally transformed our space.”

Miami’s Christy Gast is front and center in the main room with Inholdings, an “ecological and geopolitical” concern based around the Everglades Hole-in-the-Donut area. Located near Paradise Key, this parcel of land was worked until 1975 when 6,600 farming acres were abandoned. Up popped the invasive non-indigenous Brazilian Pepper from the remains of tomato fields. Surrounded by native communities this cut in the fabric of the ’Glades is called Hole-in-the-Donut. There is serious restoration work in the area now in hopes the wetland can be resurrected for local plants and wildlife to resume habitation.

Gast tromped in and out of this difficult to access parcel for over a year to parse the history and rehabilitation. Adding to it’s checkered past, a missile base was erected during the Cuban Missile Crisis housing three nuclear warheads. The Everglades National Park website informs us that the remains are the “best preserved relics of the Cold War in Florida. An historic Nike Hercules Missile Site, called Alpha Battery or HM-69, remains virtually the same as it was when official use of the site was terminated in 1979.” You may tour this area only with a guided ranger walk. It was designated an official historic district in 2004. One of the Nike missiles is currently on view.

This was the motherlode for Gast’s interests and exploration, with the eradication of the Brazilian pepper underway in the shadow of a missile underlining the moment the Uniteed States teetered on the brink of nuclear war; now hidden, forgotten, but wildy important in every way possible.

Gast wove these elements together seamlessly. In the main gallery at Locust Projects the two full scale missiles hang from the ceiling and fashioned out of fabric she had made in Oregon, depicting a tomato, Brazilian pepper and love grass print. All three plants have made this area home at one point, whether by farmers, invasion or nature. To support Gast’s sculptural element, the a one-take performance video graces the entry space. She wrote the score for video War Drums which musicians recorded live in the pine forest; the only Dade County Pine forest left in the Everglades.

Poignantly, Locust Projects ceiling is made of the now over-harvested rare native pine. At one time, Dade County Pine grew lush between the Everglades and the Atlantic in South Florida. It is strong and durable, existing still in many of the older Dade buildings. Scenes run through the video like hallucinations of the past; An Afro-Cuban beat penetrates the mind as the camera spans a 360 degree range of the hidden forest, clock-like in one minute intervals. In another scene, military drummers in uniform “interpret the sounds of the forest”.

Gast says the experience "inspired me to use the forest as a studio." She informed me as a post script that the native plants only returned to Hole-in-the-Donut after the ground was scraped clean of all remaining vestiges of the invasive plantings.

Her work has graced MoMA/P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Artist’s Space and Harris Lieberman Gallery in New York. In Miami PAMM, the Bass Museum of Art, the de la Cruz Collection, Casa Lin and Gallery Diet, among others.

As a counterpoint, the second artist exhibiting in tandem with Christy Gast is another Miami artist, Felice Grodin with A Fabricated Field installation.

“Felice Grodin’s site-specific installation has completely transformed our Project Room space. The Miami-based artist has historically worked in 2D. This represents her greatest attempt at a 3D sculptural installation and represents a very exciting breakthrough for the artists’ practice,” says Budgazad Sheldon.

Her overlapping global ideas, Grodin explains, is “....anti-architectural; more a mapping of forces that go into spaces.” As a trained architect, her ideas move along these lines. She uses plywood, wanting to “expose a universal material.” She is “interested in exploring the cracks.” Calling it geophilosophy, she refers to the term for “formations between territories” brought to light by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus.

Grodin has crafted a kind of beanstalk or cypress knees, (to stay with the Everglades theme) out of the universally used plywood, “gluing 1/16th of an inch pieces together - repeated and repeated”...... “creating a visual contrast between the machined plane and the organic bundles that belies an inter-territorial tension.”

Originally from Bologna, Grodin received her Master of Architecture with Distinction from Harvard University. She has exhibited in the Diana Lowenstein Gallery, Tampa Museum of Art and the Center on Contemporary Art in Seattle to name a few.

Saturday April 12: Don’t miss a Conversation with artists Gast and Grodin at 7 p.m.

Locust Projects is open Tuesday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., 3852 North Miami Avenue
Miami, FL 33127

1. Saturday, March 22nd: Locust Projects is inviting artists, aged 6-13, to participate in Little LAB from 11am-1pm. They’ll be able to create a project among the current exhibition at the gallery.
   RSVP: info@locustprojects.org or 305-576-8570
2. Call for submission: LAB High School and LAB MFA. Locust Projects has an open call for South Florida High School students to have an opportunity to participate in Locust Art Builders (LAB). Submission deadline: Friday April 4th, 2014
   Apply to LAB High School Summer intensive
   Apply for LAB MFA
3. April 18th Spring Fling preview Event

• Everglades missile site tours
• Deleuze and Guattari, geophilosophy in A Thousand Plateaus