Philadelphia-based artists Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib, known for their fantastical moving images and alternate realities, created a new immersive film installation for Locust Projects. Field Companion, set in a microcosmic forest, is based loosely on the pine barrens that dot Southern New Jersey near their home. Like many, the duo found refuge and solace throughout the COVID-19 pandemic hiking and foraging in these remote, natural landscapes. As America's social fabric frayed deeply over recent years, they considered forest ecosystems in terms of symbiotic and collaborative relationships that sustain coexistence and community.

Locust Projects presents The Depths, the fourth in a series of guest curated video exhibitions in Locust Projects’ Screening Room that launched in fall 2019. Guest curated by filmmaker and video artist, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, the exhibition features works by Isabelle Carbonell, Miguel Hilari, Los Ingrávidos, Sofía Gallisá Muriente and Sindhu Thirumalaisamy.  

"Toxic Lake, Salt On Film, Moon Goddess Through Violence, through desert cactus, a mine and the photographs of those who labored them. This series unfolds through relations of material and sensorial experience, they arise from an inseparability of what we think of as "place" from historical events or the deep time of geology from a multi-perspectival experimental film language." - Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, guest curator

Guest curated by Adler Guerrier and Laura Novoa featuring Andrea Bowers, Sandi Haber Fifield, David Hartt, Jim Hodges, Ebony G. Patterson, and Onajide Shabaka and newly commissioned works by Ema Ri and Cristina Lei Rodriguez.

A landscape longed for: the garden as disturbance explores the motif of the garden as used by artists in its relation to the cultivation and expression of beauty and knowledge. The works in the exhibition function around images and objects connected to and derived from the study of plants, prompting a reimagining and reinterpretation of the garden as a site for the lyrical arrangement of forms. 

OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, February 18, 7-9pm

On view Wed-Sat 11am-5pm

Artist collective the 181 (Brandon Boan, Abby Donovan, Tom Hughes, Jason Rhodes) will activate a series of circumstantial compositions considering time-based obstruction, including: the ancient Mud Lake Canal, Reserve-Capacity wave maneuvers, attempts to spot the endangered snail kite, shadow-telling trails from Mabel Cody, and other anomalous successions. Joined by artists Cose Cosmiche (Milan, IT), Emile Milgrim (Miami, FL), Rat Bastard (Miami, FL) and various passers-by, they take as their starting point the translation of something Franz Liszt is said to have written about a house concert by Frédéric Chopin: “…all idea of limit was lost, so that there seemed no boundary save the darkness of space.”

The 181 consists of: Brandon Boan, Abby Donovan, Tom Hughes, Jason Rhodes

OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, February 18, 7-9pm

On view Wed-Sat 11am-5pm

SIRG’s If the Source is Open (Megamix) continues the collective’s explorations of how sound and noise play an integral role in the structuring of life, particularly as ideas about what constitutes sound and what constitutes noise are leveraged in the struggle over cultural consensus, social power, and public space. The installation reflects upon sound norms and regulation as a form of politics by other means allows cultural criticism and historical analysis to listen, balancing overly visual articulations of social life. Additionally, the role sound plays (in the form of the protest song or call-and-response political chant, for example) is integral to the foundation of communities of practice and opposition.

OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, February 18, 7-9pm

On view Wed-Sat 11am-5pm

PLAY†PREY is a gospel presented as a multi-channel film experience, that recounts a relationship between God, the Church, and a queer Black child. The four-part film, and its accompanying architectural display, explore the playful impulses, innocence, and underlying violence implicated in the experience of queer Black children in the Christian Church. Beginning with an overture to the story of queer Biblical reclamation, this film builds a spiritual narrative that contemplates the structures and rules imposed on pleasure, play, and sexuality under the rigidity of Black Christianity. The narrative takes inspiration from four lyrical sermons from James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombone: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse. The film features an original soundtrack in collaboration with KYN (Josh Casey & Yari Bundy) and Vocals from Sandra Lawson-Ndu.

Arsimmer McCoy’s large photo mural visible along the windows on North Miami Avenue is presented as part of an initiative to invite local artists and organizations to activate Locust Projects’ Mobile Storefront Studio. The image is a still from a film by McCoy created in collaboration with filmmaker Terence Price II and an excerpt from a poem written by McCoy and artist Reginald O'Neal

The project amplifies the importance of Black health and wellness—this year's theme for Black History month. Through this project McCoy seeks to “give honor to people of color in this city that push every day to be better for themselves, their communities, and above all, their children. My health and wellness come from my heritage, my child, and creation. My black child standing tall and strong is a message to all that see it, that we are here and will continue to persevere for generations to come.”