Locust Projects is pleased to announce CORES and CUTOUTS, Ruben Ochoa's first solo exhibition in Miami. Known for using gritty, vernacular building materials such as concrete, dirt, and steel, the artist will create a new site-specific installation using the building's substructure as source material. Ochoa will cut through the concrete floor to expose subterranean cross-sections of the gallery's foundation, revealing the space where earth and architecture intersect. Cored segments of the poured concrete floor will totter on columns of substrate above their normal resting place.

Ochoa's installations address an architectural disjuncture, conflating the gallery and the art object. With a nod to both archeology and earthworks, his work at Locust Projects further explores the materials and politics of infrastructure in the social fabric. Contemplating the materiality of the built environment, Ochoa's work encourages viewers to have a deeper experience with their surroundings as they step out of the gallery and confront those same materials on the street. 

Ruben Ochoa was born 1974 in Oceanside, California. He studied at the Parsons School of Art and Design, New York, the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles (BFA, 1997), and the University of California, Irvine (MFA, 2003). He currently lives and works in Los Angeles. This year, Ochoa participated in a two person exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA. Other recent solo exhibitions include Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego, CA, 2010; Charles H. Scott Gallery at Emily Carr University, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 2009; and Site Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM, 2009. Ochoa was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 2008 he was recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and in 2005 he was awarded a Creative Capital Grant for his Freeway Wall Extraction project.

Locust Projects’ exhibitions and programming are made possible with the support from: The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; Galt & Skye Mikesell; Hannibal Cox Jr. Foundation; Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, the Cultural Affairs Council, the Mayor, and the Miami-Dade County Board of County Commissioners. Special thanks to James Cohan Gallery, New York; Christie’s; and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Los Angeles.