Now celebrating its 15th year of exhibiting experimental contemporary art, Locust Projects is pleased to present exhibition High Performance Stiffened Structures by Los Angeles-based artist Karl Haendel. The installation will feature the artist’s archive of 35mm slides projected on the walls of Locust Project’s main space by a cacophonous array of automatically advancing slide projectors. Haendel, who is mostly known for installations of large-scale graphite drawings that explore contradiction, anxiety and power, has accumulated over 10,000 slides in his archive, each one representing a potential or completed drawing. While the slides themselves are organized into categories such as Local Churches, Ampersands, Babies Crying and Terrorism each projector in the installation will only show an edited selection that attempts to draw connections between different types of categories or imagery. The advance of the projectors will not be syncopated, allowing for over a million combinations of image relationships to illuminate the space.

The list of slide categories will be printed on Locust Projects’ façade, visible only from outside of the space. Haendel writes, “Reading the list sort of tells you what my concerns are, in a distanced, objective (and funny) manner. I think they also tell you something about navigating a messy world with too much information, and how one comes to make sense, and ultimately meaning, from it. The list transcends interests and likes and becomes about choices and values. How we as a culture make meaning is at the center of my work, and this slide archive shows how over the past decade I have tried to do so myself.”

About the artist
Karl Haendel is an artist who makes drawings, installations, films, and public projects. He received a BA from Brown University in 1998 and a MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2003. He also studied at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Recent solo exhibitions include Yvon Lambert, Paris, France, The Box, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, and Lever House, New York, NY. His work has been included in recent group exhibitions at the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO; the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL; the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway; the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN; the Drawing Center, New York, NY; "Prospect II", New Orleans, LA; the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; the New Museum, New York, NY; the Fundación/Colección Jumex, Mexico; and the Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY.

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; John S. and James L. Knight 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: Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York.