Locust Projects is pleased to present an installation by Los Angeles based artist Elizabeth Cheatham Wild.

Cheatham's fascination with color saturated displays, kitsch culture debris, B-movie iconography, and beach culture camp come across in her site-specific installation. Her work deals largely with escapist themes/imagery and frequently employs a tension between tragic and comedic elements. For this installation a gigantic octopus is fabricated from pink packing peanuts and arises from a Botticelli green sea made out of garbage bags used by the Los Angeles City Department of Sanitation.

Playing on the tension between the seductive consumer orientated colors and textures referring to warning colors of safety equipment and emergency flares, this installation seeks to deliver a punch somewhere between desirous awe and disgust. Discussing the ocean as a dumping site seems to overstate the obvious, but to present it with such frolicking beauty underlines the misguided myopia of human culture.

Cheatham received her BA from the University of Virginia in 1987 and her MFA in 1994

From The Ohio State University. She received a fellowship from the Miami based organization called Nation Foundation for Advancement in the Arts from 1996-1999. In December 1999, she mounted her first solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Elizabeth Cheatham Wild's work will be showing at Locust Projects from April 14th, 2001 to May 12th, 2001. The opening reception is on Saturday, April 14th at 8 PM Locust Projects is open Saturdays from 2 to 5 PM.